Here is a bit of self-relection I would like to share with you. Its been a while since I wrote but I value your inputs.
Being under the weather over Christmas allowed me time to examine my thoughts and maybe come up with a truer assessment of what I learned from the course last year.
I learned that I love to use the skills that Moodle and the other Web 2.0 tools allow me to exercise. I learned that I am collaborator and that I learn through teaching. So none of the thoughts I recorded in my previous entry are incorrect.
My original development plan called for a 4 week course for people who want to work together in a team to find their ideal job. I still see this as very valuable and something I would like to do sometime.
But I need to ask you something more fundamental.
I put it to some of you already before the break: How do I best advance from being a techie back to being a teacher?
Remember I am not part of a learning institution. The business I am in does not really allow me to exercise any of my faciliation skills, though I hope this will one day be different.
I think I left something out though. I believe I need to stay with my areas of technical expertise. I have spent many years building up skills in IT and Internet technologies and I am an expert in some of these areas.
So I thinking I should make a second plan to become an expert in Moodle and networking, especially network security.
I think there is a need amongst Moodle teachers for some grounding in these issues. I don't believe that an emphasis on security in Moodle is scaremongering. Teachers and administrators just need to be taking sensible precautions to ensure that students are as safe as they could be, and feel secure enough to communicate as intimately as they need to.
I do need to do more research though, and talk to some Moodle admin people to see if they agree a need could be met here.
I know the idea of being a security expert goes against the grain of some of the new ideas we uncovered during our course last month. I am basically saying I want to be partly the "sage on the stage" and also the "guide on the side".
You see, one of my goals for personal development is to begin to be earning some money from onlne teaching. Its hard to justify being paid when you are not perceived as being a SME. I strongly believe in the notion of facilitating learning, but to justifty our salary in the more conventional world of business we need to step into the limelight and show some expertise.
In an ideal world I have many things I would like to teach, but this is not an ideal world. At the end of the day I am doing all this to make a living. So I need to make sure my best assets are on show.
So to sum things up for now....
My more mature reflections on what I learned on the Moodle course tell me that I need to consider my own development first and also the need to earn money. Then of course I need to work out how to achieve this my considering the professional needs of my students.
I think this means spending more time learnig to co-facilitate on Moodle courses. Development of my own Moodle course can come later.
And my questions for you once more:
1. Do you agree that personal development planning has to come before professional development planning fpr others?
2. Do you think there is a market for a course on safety and security in Moodle?
3. Do you agree I need to retain my expertise in ICT?
4. Do you also agree that combining my ICT skills with Moodle by teaching Secure and Safe Moodling is a logical step towards integrating my career?
5. Have you revisted your own personal development plan since we finished the course? If so what questions have you reopened?
Please make a posting or email me directly.
Best regards
Ian
Moodling - growing through engagement, collaboration and fun!
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Looking backwards..... and forwards
Moodling was a life-changing experience for me in 2010 with the M4T course that just ended. Looking back, what did I learn?
Industrialized, institutionalized learning which I grew up with worked for me at the time but the Internet offers a whole raft of new learming possibilities which allow massive collaboration. See Sir Ken's video posted earlier.
Collaborative or team-based learning is engaging, fun, challenging, rewarding and ultimately how human beings learn best. We are born into teams called "families' and do our most significant learning as team members.
When we collaborate we co-construct learning artifacts. We did this many times on our course. We grouped ourselves in different teams, we put ourselves in situations where we were forced to learn, we bridged from our existing knowledge base, we constructed artifacts of learning and then we evaluated those artifacts. We did all those things.
Constructivist learning design: key questions for teaching to standards By George W. Gagnon, Michelle Collay
We learned a whole bunch of new technologies: Google Docs, Skype, VoiceThread, Vimeo, Jing, Join-Me to mention a few. These all allowed us to share learning. We developed our Moodle Sandboxes with devices like WebQuests, which I still want to learn more about - they are not so straightforward.
We even went into Second Life. I had to eat the words I uttered in my last post. Second Life is indeed a valuable, powerful and flexible tool for online learning. However it might take some time before my contemporaries, even the under 30s, start using it.
Is Moodle the way forward?
For people who already use LinkedIn an Facebook, Moodle could be the way to get them learning online. People need to get used to having an online identity. They need to feel safe online. This must always be central in all our efforts to promote online learning. Wikis are an alternative to Moodle which to some might seem a little institutionalised.
And what is the way forward for me?
I am convinced that Moodle is worth a considerable investment of time and effort on my part.
To this end I have put together a project plan to develop a Moodle course for Building Career Development Teams.
I believe Moodle to be a great way to bond people in learning. People find intrinsic purpose in working both individually and as a team when using this online learning system.
If you wish to find out more, please respond to this post.
Happy New Yeart!
Ian
Friday, December 3, 2010
Engaged Learning is Powerful Learning: We DO Not all think the same, nor do we LEARN the ...
Engaged Learning is Powerful Learning: We DO Not all think the same, nor do we LEARN the ...: "Divergent thinking! In order to understand the history of the educational system that is set up (was set up---- eons ago) to educate our chi..."
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Key issue: how to meet a learner's fundamental needs through facilitation
It's been two weeks since I updated by Moodle blog, mainly because I have been busy learning. And I also have an offline life with two great boys and a lovely wife! More on that later.
Once again I have reached a crunch point. This last week was a great time of collaboration and team building with Tom. The topic of the week on the M4T Advanced was Constructivist Learning through Moodle.
A constructivist approach focuses on setting up a group learning event during which collaborators create a learning artifact which they later reflect upon. Even as individuals we learn by putting our understanding on the line by creating or repairing things. A good car mechanic will learn a little by observing another expert at work solving problems, but he will learn a lot more when he puts this theoretical knowledge into practice. Has the car fault been fixed, do the brakes now work?
Of course the extent that we can learn by doing and making mistakes depends on the nature of the job. But even the skilled surgeon one day has to practice on live human beings. A corpse can be used to simulate a real body but there is no substitute for cutting through living flesh and bone!
Tom and I put our knowledge of constructivist theory to the test on Saturday and boy was it fun. Preparation for the journey was long but free flowing largely due to an ease of communication between us. This was really well supported by good old google docs. We were deeply impressed with this tool as soon as we first jointly edited our business card. Just 2 seconds of delay between edits from both sides of the Atlantic; Last week it proved reliable and flexible enough for us to create a coherent plan for our 90 minute online session with the team. We laid out our activities in around 20 slides in an attractive form that was a useful reference point on the day. As I said to Tom after the event, it gave us the opportunity to plan and with that the flexibility to digress from the plan to meet the needs of the learners on the day.
The needs of the learners
This is what I want to talk about in today's posting. During the last week one of the big topics in the Advanced Moodlers lounge was the need to feel safe and secure within Moodle. Much discussion revolved around this issue of trust. Just as we have techniques to establish trust in our daily offline lives we have conventions that have become established on the web for maintaining trust, essential before a degree of intimacy can been established within a learning environment.
Right now you are reading my blog which is in this case published for the whole online world to see. In reality if you are reading it you probably know me. But I am writing it not with a view to forming a trust relationship. This is just a record of my thoughts. It's a one to many communication. Notice I only mention "Tom" by his first name. He has a right to his anonymity. If he chooses to reveal himself thrugh his own blog that's up to him. So I respect my co-learners need for anonymity.
But once I have learners in a virtual learning environment like Moodle, they have other fundamental needs. Trust is the main one here.
I said I'm at a crunch point. At such points I like to go back to basics and look at Maslow's Pyramid of Needs:
As you see and well remember safety comes right at the bottom as a fundamental need. When we have noone to trust we lose our sense of safety. This has to be maintained within a Moodle. But all the other needs have to be met too. And we should do nothing which might undermine those needs being met.
Once we feel secure we can build friendships. From friendships we derive our confidence in dealing what ever life throws our way. Then of course we can move on to the higher levels of creativity and problem solving which is at the heart of our Moodle work.
Let me pick out the key point in our discussion on feeling safe in Moodle. We need to feel happy about our own identity online. I suggest that this means we are happy with ourselves offline too. Then we need to see that our colleagues are who they purport to be. Then we can build a relationship with them and carry on with our mutual learning journey.
Ian, get to the point!
This is the crunch point right here, and it hurts!
So our shared learning session on Saturday highlighted two major issues for me:
- we had not yet grappled with constructivist learning theory and understood it, we had not completed the set assignments
- we had not got stuck into our Moodle sandboxes sufficiently (Tom excepted) so we were not actually becoming the Advanced Moodlers we are supposed to be turning into
So why on earth are we about to go beyond Moodle? We have not done Moodle yet. What is the rationale behind the curriculum here? Perhaps the assumption was that we all had the skills in setting up forums and other activities in Moodle. This certainly does not appear to be the case here.
So why Second Life?
We are now being urged to dive into Second Life. Second Life does not build on what we have learned so far about being ourselves. Or I am I over-emphasising my personal learning here? Others have different needs which need to be fulfilled. I have found people in M4T to be genuine people I would like to know thee people in what I call the "Real World". Perhaps the "offline world" is a better term here. I know that some of you out there feel so at home online that "online" equals "real".
I am not trying to say anything profound here, just stating the way I see things.
Right now you might have to drag me into Second Life. I want Moodle, Skype, Google Docs to be a set of tools that let me function in my offline life.
The more I get involved online, the more I see the need to be grounded in offline activities. It could be a great symbiosis I guess. Finally I might get a real balance between on and offline. And I might also learn to switch off when I am not working and R E L A X!
For example, as a skilled ICT person I want to be able to make a living online. I am totally happy with Skype as a tool for chatting and phoning with friends and family all over the world.
This course has already changed my behaviour online, so it must have met a need. This I believe is the need for intimacy and friendship. So now I use chat in Skype a lot more. It helps me sort out my thoughts.
When I write emails or blog entries like this one I feel like I am preaching! But the parishioners have all gone home to chat in Skype! This blogging thing is just a way of gettig something off my chest and it's therapeutic. But communication it probably is not. If you got this far reading my blog for today, then wll done you!
I think one of you pointed out already that blogging is sooo Nineties! It's all about Facebook and Twitter now, two technolgies I could also write about sometime.
What need does Second Life fulfill in someone's life? All those groovy things you can do in Second Life you can do in the streets of Cork and in the surrounding countryside.
Go to the pub and enjoy a pint of Beamish, some live fiddling and the craic!
Walk through a frost covered field and watch the sunrise.
Get a First Life first.
Here's my friend Pius by the way, an IT guy but a real Cork man, always down the pub at sessions He has life SORTED:
Cheers,
Ian
Once again I have reached a crunch point. This last week was a great time of collaboration and team building with Tom. The topic of the week on the M4T Advanced was Constructivist Learning through Moodle.
A constructivist approach focuses on setting up a group learning event during which collaborators create a learning artifact which they later reflect upon. Even as individuals we learn by putting our understanding on the line by creating or repairing things. A good car mechanic will learn a little by observing another expert at work solving problems, but he will learn a lot more when he puts this theoretical knowledge into practice. Has the car fault been fixed, do the brakes now work?
Of course the extent that we can learn by doing and making mistakes depends on the nature of the job. But even the skilled surgeon one day has to practice on live human beings. A corpse can be used to simulate a real body but there is no substitute for cutting through living flesh and bone!
Tom and I put our knowledge of constructivist theory to the test on Saturday and boy was it fun. Preparation for the journey was long but free flowing largely due to an ease of communication between us. This was really well supported by good old google docs. We were deeply impressed with this tool as soon as we first jointly edited our business card. Just 2 seconds of delay between edits from both sides of the Atlantic; Last week it proved reliable and flexible enough for us to create a coherent plan for our 90 minute online session with the team. We laid out our activities in around 20 slides in an attractive form that was a useful reference point on the day. As I said to Tom after the event, it gave us the opportunity to plan and with that the flexibility to digress from the plan to meet the needs of the learners on the day.
The needs of the learners
This is what I want to talk about in today's posting. During the last week one of the big topics in the Advanced Moodlers lounge was the need to feel safe and secure within Moodle. Much discussion revolved around this issue of trust. Just as we have techniques to establish trust in our daily offline lives we have conventions that have become established on the web for maintaining trust, essential before a degree of intimacy can been established within a learning environment.
Right now you are reading my blog which is in this case published for the whole online world to see. In reality if you are reading it you probably know me. But I am writing it not with a view to forming a trust relationship. This is just a record of my thoughts. It's a one to many communication. Notice I only mention "Tom" by his first name. He has a right to his anonymity. If he chooses to reveal himself thrugh his own blog that's up to him. So I respect my co-learners need for anonymity.
But once I have learners in a virtual learning environment like Moodle, they have other fundamental needs. Trust is the main one here.
I said I'm at a crunch point. At such points I like to go back to basics and look at Maslow's Pyramid of Needs:
Once we feel secure we can build friendships. From friendships we derive our confidence in dealing what ever life throws our way. Then of course we can move on to the higher levels of creativity and problem solving which is at the heart of our Moodle work.
Let me pick out the key point in our discussion on feeling safe in Moodle. We need to feel happy about our own identity online. I suggest that this means we are happy with ourselves offline too. Then we need to see that our colleagues are who they purport to be. Then we can build a relationship with them and carry on with our mutual learning journey.
Ian, get to the point!
This is the crunch point right here, and it hurts!
So our shared learning session on Saturday highlighted two major issues for me:
- we had not yet grappled with constructivist learning theory and understood it, we had not completed the set assignments
- we had not got stuck into our Moodle sandboxes sufficiently (Tom excepted) so we were not actually becoming the Advanced Moodlers we are supposed to be turning into
So why on earth are we about to go beyond Moodle? We have not done Moodle yet. What is the rationale behind the curriculum here? Perhaps the assumption was that we all had the skills in setting up forums and other activities in Moodle. This certainly does not appear to be the case here.
So why Second Life?
We are now being urged to dive into Second Life. Second Life does not build on what we have learned so far about being ourselves. Or I am I over-emphasising my personal learning here? Others have different needs which need to be fulfilled. I have found people in M4T to be genuine people I would like to know thee people in what I call the "Real World". Perhaps the "offline world" is a better term here. I know that some of you out there feel so at home online that "online" equals "real".
I am not trying to say anything profound here, just stating the way I see things.
Right now you might have to drag me into Second Life. I want Moodle, Skype, Google Docs to be a set of tools that let me function in my offline life.
The more I get involved online, the more I see the need to be grounded in offline activities. It could be a great symbiosis I guess. Finally I might get a real balance between on and offline. And I might also learn to switch off when I am not working and R E L A X!
For example, as a skilled ICT person I want to be able to make a living online. I am totally happy with Skype as a tool for chatting and phoning with friends and family all over the world.
This course has already changed my behaviour online, so it must have met a need. This I believe is the need for intimacy and friendship. So now I use chat in Skype a lot more. It helps me sort out my thoughts.
When I write emails or blog entries like this one I feel like I am preaching! But the parishioners have all gone home to chat in Skype! This blogging thing is just a way of gettig something off my chest and it's therapeutic. But communication it probably is not. If you got this far reading my blog for today, then wll done you!
I think one of you pointed out already that blogging is sooo Nineties! It's all about Facebook and Twitter now, two technolgies I could also write about sometime.
What need does Second Life fulfill in someone's life? All those groovy things you can do in Second Life you can do in the streets of Cork and in the surrounding countryside.
Go to the pub and enjoy a pint of Beamish, some live fiddling and the craic!
Walk through a frost covered field and watch the sunrise.
Get a First Life first.
Here's my friend Pius by the way, an IT guy but a real Cork man, always down the pub at sessions He has life SORTED:
Cheers,
Ian
Sunday, November 14, 2010
How do you feel about the M4T so far?
I just had to capture my thoughts on the moodling we have done so far.
My main thoughts revolve around participation and collaboration.
Week 0 was ok, mainly spent starting this blog, a very useful exercise.
Week 0 enden on Saturday 13th with our first Wiziq. I am a bit hazy o what we achieved. I do know that I found speaking into Wiziq quite spooky. Everything goes dead for a while as the mike is passed to you and you pick it up. Then its like speaking to yourself. There is no audio or facial feedback as you get with Skype. What you do get are the text prompts which I found useful to read out as the came in. I guess this kind of completes the communication loop. Anyway some talented people introduced themselves, I am very keen to work and learn with you.
I think the decision we made to continue holding the Wiziqs 11.00 EST on Saturdays could be a mistake. Several people didn't make the first one, possibly because the time is wrong. 11.00 EST is 16.00 Dublin/London time. I guess that would be 21.30 for example in Delhi, perhaps not convenient for Ramesh.
Ramesh what do you think?
The wiziq terminated abruptly and we went on to try and sort out the groups for week 1 collaboration. We went straight from WizIQ to the chat facility in M4T Advanced. This threw up the idea of using a Wiki or Google docs to organise ourselves. But of course the chat involved the people from the Wiziq.
We need to widen participation here. I decided to continue the debate in the Forum. Once again it's the same people who are participating here. How do we fix this I wonder?
Another thing that interests me is how effectively I am using the Moodle interface. I still find the interface very texty. I like the use of the icons such as
for forums, but they could be clearer and bigger. Actually I have noticed we are not using the this classic icon for forums anymore. I don' think our new icons are very clear, especially for a Moodle newbie. Better and larger icons would aid Navigation by making things more graphical. Maybe this is different in Moodle 2.0.
Anyway we move forward slowly but surely.
My main thoughts revolve around participation and collaboration.
Week 0 was ok, mainly spent starting this blog, a very useful exercise.
Week 0 enden on Saturday 13th with our first Wiziq. I am a bit hazy o what we achieved. I do know that I found speaking into Wiziq quite spooky. Everything goes dead for a while as the mike is passed to you and you pick it up. Then its like speaking to yourself. There is no audio or facial feedback as you get with Skype. What you do get are the text prompts which I found useful to read out as the came in. I guess this kind of completes the communication loop. Anyway some talented people introduced themselves, I am very keen to work and learn with you.
I think the decision we made to continue holding the Wiziqs 11.00 EST on Saturdays could be a mistake. Several people didn't make the first one, possibly because the time is wrong. 11.00 EST is 16.00 Dublin/London time. I guess that would be 21.30 for example in Delhi, perhaps not convenient for Ramesh.
Ramesh what do you think?
The wiziq terminated abruptly and we went on to try and sort out the groups for week 1 collaboration. We went straight from WizIQ to the chat facility in M4T Advanced. This threw up the idea of using a Wiki or Google docs to organise ourselves. But of course the chat involved the people from the Wiziq.
We need to widen participation here. I decided to continue the debate in the Forum. Once again it's the same people who are participating here. How do we fix this I wonder?
Another thing that interests me is how effectively I am using the Moodle interface. I still find the interface very texty. I like the use of the icons such as
Anyway we move forward slowly but surely.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Watch my video
I sat up late last night and wanted to record my voice to share with you. I am just learning all the multimedia capabilities on my Apple Mac and it seemed easier just to do a video.
I just turned on Imovie and moved the Mac to a corner of my room where there is light. Next time I will do it all during the day by the window when there is natural light. I look so much more beautiful!
So for now what you get is basically a talking head with poor lighting, but at least you hear my voice.
It's my first attempt so I am pretty pleased with it.
I just turned on Imovie and moved the Mac to a corner of my room where there is light. Next time I will do it all during the day by the window when there is natural light. I look so much more beautiful!
So for now what you get is basically a talking head with poor lighting, but at least you hear my voice.
It's my first attempt so I am pretty pleased with it.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Thoughts for Wednesday
I am feeling in two minds about Moodle right now.
On the one hand it is the future. I viewed the Dougiamas video on Moodle 2.0 and I can see that it is a major step forward from the first version.
It allows so much linking to other online worlds, there are so many ways to add photos, videos, and even links to colaborative workspaces like Google Docs.
Moodle does not aim to compete with other products, it accomodates them.
What about my second mind?
I aleady live apart from my family, they are in the UK and for work reasons I am in Cork, Ireland. So I communicate with them by phone and email - and skype.
I spend my day at work in virtual worlds looking at problems with anti-malware products. I do not interact with people in what I feel is a meaningful, fulfilling way, I solve problems. From my previous post you can see I would like this to be different.
So in the evenings do I really want to be doing what I am doing now? Reflecting to myself on what I am learning? "Communicating" with a group of people I am likely never to meet in person?
I see inherent dangers in working online.
It's a 24/7 world and I haven't learned to switch off. I don't have my family with me to help me do this, and i find it tough being alone. Do I really want to be an online learning facilitator? There is the danger that I will be helping others learn how to learn online and I wil lose touch with any "real-world" activities.
I do have my music which grounds me and brings me real life encounters. I need more of this.
Anyway, tomorrow or Friday I will make another entry here. I want to investigate another way I could use Moodle. This would be to help friends I have made here in Cork with their career development. There are a number of French people who do not realize how different the employment market is in the UK and Eire.
I would like to get them Moodling - perhaps...
But is Moodle the right platform for this. I don't want to lead people into a world I am not happy with myself. It's a media rich world which teams with learning opportnities, but can we find that balance between the real and the virtual worlds.
It remains to be seen.
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