27 October – 2 November
Dear ONLers,
This week, we’ll have the opportunity to catch up and reflect. The course may seem to consist of a lot of meetings and activities, but a major part of it is what happens in between. Therefore, this week does not contain any common scheduled events and since you are all busy people, you probably have one or two things in the course that you need to catch up with. Your group has been working for five weeks, and you have hopefully written your first two reflective posts. These are a few questions to ponder:
- When you look back at the meetings with your group, what do you see? What are you happy with? What could you do differently (better?)? If you decided on an agreement for how you wanted to work in your group, go back and have a look at it. Has it done its job? Anything you need to change or remediate?
- Writing your reflective posts – how has that been for you? For most academics, writing is defined as serious work done within certain terms of reference, depending on which subject area one belongs to. With these reflections, there’s an opportunity to do something different, something else – an opportunity to let one’s personality show, express views and opinions. And… it can be difficult and scary too. If you haven’t already, we strongly suggest that you read a few of your fellow participants’ posts, and comment! There’s nothing like comments for motivation! Have a look at all openly shared reflective posts from participants who connected their reflection spaces. If you are part of a PBL group, you can find more reflections in the ONL252 community space.
Course requirement individual reflection
Please also see Reflection Spaces Connected
At this point, you may have noticed that the initial frustration or feeling of clumsiness and awkwardness in using some of the tools has somehow subsided. We believe this is because you are DOING things, that the course reflects an authentic experience of immersion in the material provided or found in the course. We often say, ‘The course IS the course,’ and the outcome depends largely on what you do with it. So creating your own accounts and familiarizing yourself with the course environment is not preparation before the course starts, but well-invested course time and part of the content! We look forward to reading your reflection posts and learning from all of you.
For this reason, it is important that you reflect on your actions and share your thoughts so that others can pick up on one idea or another and take it further.
With this in mind: Happy continuing!
