When I read for the first time topic 3 title I thought we would share experience about our teaching and learning processes that we conduct in different communities. I suspected that we would talk about teaching young students, adults or adults in their working environment, e.g. a company. This is what I do as a teacher of English- I deal with so many and so versatile groups : as far as their age, education level, place they are taught are concerned.
Nonetheless , it was completely different perspective..
For me the crucial breakthrough in the perception of the topic was listening to Kay Oddone’s ( from Charles Stuart University in Australia) “Theory and Practice”. Then facilitated or supplemented by her webinar with Alastair Creelman from Linnaeus University in Sweden.
Kay Oddone suggests that we create our Personal Learning Network (PLN) thanks to two main ways of acquiring knowledge: Learning in Communities and Learning in Networks. Due to the fact that I was one of the coordinators of this topic in our PBL group we led the discussion in such a way that we wanted to get deeper into the problem to understand it better. I personally started reading from various sources about learning in communities and learning in networks and I discovered a huge number of researches, examples or implementations of these two.
Currently I am able to name learning in community as working together for achieving common goal. People build stronger ties using different types of tools and their personal cooperation to gain success together. On the other hand , network learning means that each member of a given network strives to achieve his or her individual goal taking advantage of various network links they belong to. For them networking is gaining rich source of information needed to fulfill the task. Thus , our small PBL group is a community and the whole ONL organization is network.
Another aspect of working in networks and communities was the use of technology. That was such a vast topic to read and talk about that we had problems how to narrow it a bit.
If we want to connect with a learning network or my learning community nowadays the best way is to choose a common online means of communication that would suit everybody- so that we could exchange ideas, set tasks, set meeting times etc. We also need to establish some collaborative online means of cooperation. Both of the above bring us to social learning and PLN. Why do we want to or tend to work in groups rather than individually? Because we not only get the chance to discuss and share the ideas for the project but we get feedback about our own work. We trust those people and we want to create something which is better and better.
However the prevailing notion I learned from researching the topic of Learning in Communities was that of Connectivism “ Siemens’ article Connectivism: Learning as a Network Creation was published online in 2004 and Downes’ article An Introduction to Connective Knowledge was published the following year” Here a teacher is a guide for students to help them become effective agents of their personal learning and development. They use simulations based on virtual instructions, they practice gamification to feel competition and they use social media , like Twitter for communication within the class.
For me it sounds like ideal classes I would like to run with my students! I believe I will do it soon!
Oh dear! Am I rowing?! Yes, I am!
