What effect has the learning experience from this course had on your development of personal learning networks and environments?

Effects are tremendous!! I entered with ONL in a completely new world. I learnt everything, even though I recognized myself in most of the Topics we worked on during this course. It opened my eyes to many aspects of “Networked learning practice” and “Networked Learning interest” in many ways. I feel ready and convince that “Open Networked Learning” is the best way to share, communicate and implement ideas and increase knowledge. ONL has opened my eyes to the possibilities of online learning and of the many ways of collaboration. I don’t know yet how much and how fast it will impact my teaching/collaborating environment, but the concept of the PLN has opened a new field to me that will certainly inspire me in the future. I was also very much amazed at how we came together as a group, we were in different parts of the world, with different working interest, and strangers until we met on this course. Through PLN, I understood that by connecting on an online space we can work together and learn from each other much faster and sometime much better than on regular emails.

 And in your own professional practice? What were the benefits and what were the challenges? 

Benefits include many different aspects: 1) the online tools and resources to which we have been introduced; 2) the online group space practice, that make me realized how powerful it is; 3) meeting new people, 4) joining a new community; 5) the power of new technology to share my interests with a large population; 6) create new communities . 

Challenges were divers but the main one was time. It was a challenge for me to read, assimilate, understand the resources each time and then get into it. It was also challenging to write the blog AND comment on other’s blogs; even though I recognized that it helped me a lot to understand what was expected from me for my blog. It was also somewhat awkward initially to start the group work before we had had a chance to get to know each other a bit more, and to understand the working methods of this course. This improved meeting by meeting, however, and the initial challenge of working in an online environment has now disappeared and it seems quite natural now to talk to people only through the screen, suggest things, add points to our shared document, and see words appear on the document written by someone in the group sitting on the other side of the world. 

Challenges were huge at the beginning of this course. As I said, I entered a “teaching community” that I felt not being part of. I had a hard time understanding the vocabulary used and I was lost in what people expected from me. In brief, I was very scared and wondered what I was doing here.Thanks to Clive and Lotta for guiding us with a lot of patience and simplicity. Thanks to Thaiurie and Heli to share your experience in the field, Thanks to Suzana for sharing some of my fears and to discuss them openly. And thanks to Nosi for being like me, out of the “teaching community” and feeling outside of the topics, so I did not feel lonely ;-). Thanks to all the group to help me to develop my skills in communication, openness, e-tools (I still must improve so much, because I just realized how powerful it is).

What are the next steps?

I am now thinking to create an open platform to share ideas with my collaborators (and leave it open for others that would like to join the community) and my peers. It can be in the form of canva or padlet I do not know yet.

I will start some twitter experiences (but I am still a beginner so it may take some time).

I will start my lectures differently. Possibly introducing the topic of my lecture in advance (and in a better way that I was used to do it) to the students so they arrive with a better idea of the content and the goals. It will give more space and time for sharing and interaction within the time we have together.