photo credit: Luis Alfonso Orellana on Unsplash

I’ve been lucky to join a good group in the open online course called Open Networked Learning (ONL). We are joining from Brazil, Finland Germany, South Africa, Sweden and the US. Some people are Open Learners; others have university affiliations.

For the past two weeks, my ONL group (the Eleveners) has been exploring Online Participation and Digital Literacies. We began our focus by generating questions of interest in a shared document and then narrowing down to what pushed us to dig deeper.

When
we came together and shared our collective learning we used Padlet to compile
our questions and findings, and then summarized key points. It felt exciting
and satisfying to see our inquiry come to life on the Padlet and emerge as something
new – like a fabric created by the group from individual threads of inquiry;
the threads are strong and vibrant.   

Working
with this group helped me see how my work as a student (learner) and collaborator
with this ONL group are deeply tied. My colleague Anya and I investigated how
to make the learning environment welcoming and open to new students and
researched strategies that build this. When we met and talked about what we’d
learned and how to represent it to the rest of the group and their findings she
helped me realize that my experience as a student (providing required weekly feedback
to my professor on positive and challenging elements of the course) connects
with learning on the ONL group. We agreed this is an especially rich and
valuable type of metacognition that occurs when a student researches and reflects
how to create a safe and open environment.