Friday 18 January 2013

Looking back at the first week - OLDS MOOC

Time flies!
I know from other MOOCs that I have done that the first few days (weeks?) in a new MOOC experience can be unsettling and frustrating. But I found that by persevering and having some faith that you will get there in the end brought great rewards (testing my growth mindset to the limit! - see Dweck). #change11 was the most rewarding MOOC - and also the most frustrating at the beginning; this was a constructivist MOOC and I had not realised how imbibed with this approach I had become.
OLDS MOOC was frustrating at first because of a constraining communications and sharing platform - Cloudworks. To fulfill the communications and sharing aspect, finding pages again and being able to interact across pages are key requirements. I did not find success in these requirements - come back Stephen Downes and his website all is forgiven! Although it needed much work on his part to keep up to date, it fulfilled its purpose well.
I've had a go at trying out existing social media for communications and sharing and this is showing promise. Twitter is always good for this but I am really warming to Google + Communities. This has the potential of being an excellent platform for this (have been using it with my family and have been really pleased with it - personal, private, instant and fun).
I set up "OLDS MOOC - Schools" community to try to generate interest in this subdivision of Learning Design and it has eleven members at the time of writing. Glad to have help from Penny Bentley which I have found encouraging.
The idea behind this community was to be a study group with a special interest (Learning Design is schools), but I have yet to establish a project. Cloudworks did not work for me for this and had hopes that Wallwisher would - yet to see if this will generate an interest in Learning Design in schools using Google Apps suite of programmes. Perhaps it is too specific - if no interest is shown I shall have to look again.
Looking forward to week 2 - although I note that the day-by-day structure of the course is very specific and requires you to keep up. Some of us do have jobs and the daily requirement is proving difficult. Also, having not found a project yet I am not sure how this week will work.
We shall see.

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