This is young Melissa in her happy place – in front of the fire with the family dog, Karl. Being an 80s kid, my sister and I didn’t grow up with computers or the internet. Research for school assignments meant going to the library, finding a book, booking it out for a little while and returning it when you were done. My youth was spent outside – planting beans with my sister, playing with our dogs or rabbits and making blanket forts with old sheets. Not in front of the computer, iPad or laptop. Internet? What internet?

Mrs Gillies changed all that when computer education was first introduced in my school. I remember DOS being explained to us in class and we had to pretend we were turtles – lying on our tummies on a cushion, navigating our way around the classroom floor. This would seemingly help us understand programming language and the interesting designs we could make. And from then on, I thought computers were cool. Very cool.

Since then, I have spent my entire adult career interested in Educational Technology. In my lecturing years, I attended the North South VET ICT Conference being hosted in Cape Town that year and was blown away by the capabilities of EdTech; this was when the concept of a flipped classroom was relatively new. I then went on to serve as a Programme Manager of an online qualification in Public Health for many years where I became more involved with instructional and learning design, as well as LMS technology. But despite all of this evolution and growth in terms of all things online, I still somehow relate to the person described in the scenario when it comes down to social media and the level of exposure I feel in even just writing this blog post.

I feel that ONL could be instrumental in aiding and building a sense of self-efficacy; to better understand not only the educational, but personal value some of these techniques may have in both my personal and professional life.

Perhaps, we can consider Doug Belshaw’s TedTalk (“Essential Elements of Digital Literacies”) and link this to the theory of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977 and Hoy, 2000). This theory emphasises the skills, attitudes and behaviours needed, “To succeed in a particular situation.” This has also got me thinking about what I need to feel that I have succeeded … and why.

By my own admission, I am a control freak. An introvert. Acutely OCD. And our PBL meetings have been difficult for me to adjust to for this reason. If I reflect honestly on why this may be, I think it is because building that community of inquiry and establishing cognitive presence online is a more fluid, unstructured process than just a “research this and blog post that” type of one. Garrison et al (2001) defines cognitive presence as, “The extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry.” So I suspect – with time – I will experience and understand the “meaning“ and just what this course may reveal to me about my own biases and challenges. Let’s make Mrs Gillies proud!