Topic 5: Lessons learned – future practice

Here come my thoughts as part of ONL211 topic 5.

The last topic is about my lessons learnt and the future practice, so the task for this blog post is to reflect on my learning and development during the course. One main question guides my reflection: What are the most important things that I have learnt through my engagement in the ONL course? The last group challenge for the PBL work was to create a summarizing picture (a macro or a meme). I thought this would also be a fun way to do the reflection task.

Firstly, I have never created a meme before this course. I was not even aware that such simple meme generators existed on the net. So, I was interested in learning about memes and their use in teaching. Reyes et al. (2018) point out that memes and GIFs are powerful and useful classroom tools. They can be used as icebreakers and for check-ins or as ways to explore society and culture, because “the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words might be an understatement for memes and GIFs that have an uncanny way of encapsulating social controversies.[…] This leads to a rich discussion and connects course content to current events.” They also note that memes and GIFs can be used to demonstrate course concepts: “Moving up Bloom’s taxonomy from analyze to create, students can make their own GIFs and memes to demonstrate understanding of a course concept. This activity can be used in class as an informal and fun assessment technique.” And that’s exactly what I’m going to do now and share some of the memes I’ve created. Feel free to start a discussion.