Purpose of the blog: Online Presence

In 2011, the Learning Centre at Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand, will provide extra online learning support to both distance and on-site students. We want to utilize the Internet more, and be available over a greater range of hours. The student-dedicated blog to accompany this is USE IT OR LOSE IT!

"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people" - William Butler Yeats



Tuesday, 14 November 2006

All in the same boat

Attended a face-to-face workshop for Facilitating Online in the august company of Marc Doesberg, Janet Black, Willie Campbell and others.

It was apparent that we are all striving to understand the new technology, and that we are all struggling to cope with the immensity of what is 'out there' for us to use.

Everyone expressed a sense of frustration and anxiety in the face of a very new style of teaching, which is important to remember whenever we expose students to an online enviroment.

Certainly there is a huge potential for learning to be assisted with online learning, and all of us are aware of that. The question is how to facilitate and manage this, both for our students and for ourselves.

A few notes that I took that may serve to remind what was covered . . .

  • Look at Google Groups, TALO, and Wikiversity - networked learning.
  • Develop FAQs from our own course(s)
  • See 147 practical tips, Emoderating, Etivities (all in the library or from Bronwyn Hegarty).
  • Don't penalise lurkers - they are learning their own way
  • The powerpoint we heard is available on blackboard
  • Computer suites need headphones
  • When the class advance as a cohort, how much verbal interaction do we allow or encourage at points along the way?
  • Send Marc a link to the wikipedia article that shows the timeline development of a music article
  • Marc seeks a way to highlight those words in a text that are in wordlists.
  • 'learning community' is the new buzzword

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