As I embarked on this ONL journey, I am not sure what my expectations were, apart from wanting to learn about learning in a digital classroom setting, however “fluffy” that might sound in writing. What I do know, however, is that my perspective on and my approach to this course has changed over time. From being an individual looking at the course objectives and the tasks at hand, preparing to engage in collaboration and group activities, I became emerged in the group discussions and the freedom of being creative with others, not worrying about what learning objectives we were working towards, but focusing on the actual learning itself. In this final week, we were asked to create memes that describe our journey and our reflections, and the picture above is one of my memes, illustrating that the process is all about scaffolding each other in this course. (The notion of scaffolding is explained in simple terms here, with regards to both practical aspects and a learning perspective: https://ctl.wiley.com/scaffolding-learning-in-the-online-classroom/)
As it turns out, the learning objectives and the themes throughout the course were just there to offer some scaffolding to our learning process. The actual “take-away” from the course was the collaboration itself; how we established trust and openness in our group, and how we let go of control and roles and just went into a creative, collaborative mode. The more we got to know each other in the group, and the more we all accepted the free form, the easier it was to brainstorm and see potential in different interpretations. We had a lot of metaphors in our group, and used a multi-modal approach to whatever topic we were given. It was a wonderful journey. We had a mix of people from different countries and with different competences and experiences, and sometimes I wasn’t sure where we were going with a given theme, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the group were going somewhere, and things happened in the collaboration. It was like that good old saying that it wasn’t the destination that was important, it was the journey. In a course that used themes and topics as scaffolding, we ended up scaffolding each other to find creative interpretations where everyone in the group could contribute with thoughts and ideas.
When I tried to meme my way through my learning process, it looked something like this:
Thank you PBL10 for a very unique and different experience. It’s been an eye opener.