ONL gave me an opportunity to learn quite a lot of stuff. In the beginning it was bit hard to go around the new website, but it was god that we had first week to know how things worked. The best thing I found was strong facilitation that got us together as quite new members. Her concrete decisions and keeping everybody together brought us on a single page rather quickly than I wondered. I have encountered a true facilitation in this PBL group, brought us together and then we worked together as a team.
This ONL journey opened up my vision about digitalization and has rather made me more confident in the digital space both work and private. Learning about digital citizenship was pretty interesting for me. Other Topics were somewhat familiar to me based on my Medical Education background but new things like PLN, community of inquiry, looking into social loafing kept thinking how I can apply them in later practice. The factor of emotional presence was of utmost importance to me as I am involved in planning some online course where I am trying to apply them to get people going comfortably.
Technology is quite challenging aspect when gathering different people with different backgrounds online, everybody might not be so acquainted with digital tools as others. So to create an environment where everybody is comfortable and helping each other is of utmost importance. I came across several tools like trading cards, infographics (which was quite tricky for me to collaborate on), prezi and Coggle and Book Creator (which I am currently exploring), Thinglink , Though we did not use it but still it was interesting. We as a team were great in helping each other with tools and collaborated a lot. Zoom ‘s new features that I came across and its smoothness helped me to choose Zoom for my online courses and I finally purchased one for me. Twitter was not my cup of tea, its hard to manage a lot of soical media without noticing the silent wastage of time.
While understanding collaboration, cooperation became my area of interest as I had a good idea about collaboration but I understood was that we cannot leave cooperation behind while collaborating.
Openness and its challenges are quite tricky. Few days back when I tried to practically apply it Openness showed me its real face. I was lost between how to cope with audience, what extent of openness should be in my short course. Found that it is like getting out of your comfort zone right in front of the public and face everything. Thinking and feeling about openness in education seems very easy and light but applying it is so complicated for me.
As a team I was reflecting on Communities of practice by Wenger (2006). “The domain” where members are not just members, but they have collective interests and learn from each other (Wenger, E 2006). Thinking about this our group learned from each other and shared a common interest that was online learning. “The Community in pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. (Wenger. E, 2006). So, we had collaborated quite well as a community. “The Practice,
Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice.” (Wenger. E, 2006) So far we have decided to keep our PBL group to experience the practice.
I will miss these PBL sessions.
References:
Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge university press
