I’m going to have to change my profile page and the About Me section in this blog.
My journey, learning, and experiences throughout this course E-Learning and Digital Cultures, my first MOOC from the University of Edinburgh, has been a truly amazing one. My primary goal was to learn new tools to enhance learning for my students. I know that I have only sampled a few of the wonderful applications available, but I’m on my way! I also learned that I’m not alone in this endeavor to be a better teacher, a better student, a better world citizen. I’ve learned about technological determinism, Utopias and Dystopias, Connectivist Learning Theory, Social Constuctivism, what it means to be human, transhumanism, posthumanism and a myriad of things along the way that I just stumbled upon. What I want to point out here in this blog, is that the quality of my experience in this course could not, would not have happened were it not for the connections that I’ve made, my Fraingers, Friends/Strangers, a word coined by my fellow Moocmate, Ary
This core group of “peeps” as Laurie calls us in her blog, Broadening the Base,http://lsniestrath.wordpress.com/,has provided valuable insight, encouraged and inspired me in this five week journey. I could have done it without them, but the experience would have been lackluster. I haven’t had this much fun and learned so much in all my 30+ years of teaching.I learned many valuable things to improve my craft, but most of all, I learned something about myself and the process of learning. If our goal as educators is to instill a love of learning and civic responsibility to the young minds entrusted to us, then I suggest we use every tool imaginable to accomplish this task. Connectivist Theory and Social Constructivism seem the appropriate means to that end. With all the possibilities that this digital world of ours provide, we as educators should embrace new technology and teach students how to search, filter, analyze, critique,and create from this sea of information. If we are successful in passing on the skills needed, WE will have created that well informed, rational and moral generation who will boldly go and build a better future. My Final assignment for this course is presented here – My Digital Artefact,
SEEDS OF CHANGE.
This work by Willa Ryerson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
I really enjoyed this. I particularly liked the juxtapositions and the final message about it being up to us. Good work.
Hi Nat, Thank you for your kind words. I’m hoping that the peer reviewers will have similar sentiments.
HI Willa, I’m so happy to have shared your journey, and that you have shared in mine. I often think the quadblogging nailed it for many of us. I have read so many blogs with no comments, what a lonely writing journey. We had each other and I think that made all the difference in the academic side of the course, ie responding to the course content: knowing there were people to talk to about it with through our blogs. Of course the many other shared experiences we had that were amazing too, but I just wanted to let you know, as my quadblogging buddy, how much I have enjoyed your company in edcMOOC (and your lovely artefact, but I told you that already!) Angela