Open Networked Learning - Sara Ihlman

In my line of work, as an e-learning designer in the corporate world, I seldom get the opportunity to teach in the more traditional context. What I do is mostly creating a product for people to learn from on their own, without the help of a teacher. I do however have an agreement for cooperation with a company which wants me to produce a blended learning course in the next few months, and chances are I will also be facilitating the online meetings for them and possibly teach some during the IRL sessions. Topic 4 gave me inspiration and highlighted a few things that I will make sure to incorporate in my course. One of the ideas behind the course that the company wants me to make a blended learning version of, is to create a community. When the participants have passed the examination and gets their certificate, they also get access to this community. This means that a learning network is already in place once they are ready - but I as a course producer and facilitator also have to est...

In Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment the authors mention the theory of connectivism proposed by Siemens in 2005. This perspective describes my own learning experience for the last ten years perfectly. Let me explain why: As mentioned in my previous posts, I’ve been a teacher for 17 years and during that time I’ve spent a lot of time online. In the beginning it was mostly about making my work available for students and their parents, but as social media platforms like Facebook gained in popularity I began using them to find other teachers that I could learn from. Some of them were not even aware that they were part of my personal learning environment, and some of them I’ve even met in person. The thing that has been most fruitful in terms of personal learning network for me has been facebook groups. I join groups that are focusing on the topics I want to learn more about or discuss, and in there I can share my thoughts and ideas and get inspire...

In my practice as a teacher I wanted to have as much of my material in open spaces as possible. That was party because I wanted my students and their parents to be able to take part of it anytime and anywhere, but also because I wanted other teachers to be able to use my material if they wanted. As teachers we tend to invent the wheel over and over again, and I know first-hand how much easier your job gets when you can get inspired by how others have done, or just plain use someone else’s material. By sharing my work it became part of other teachers’ personal learning environment and I became part of their personal learning network, as Kay Oddone puts it in her blog post about PNE PLN, LMS and ONL. Funnily enough, this has led to my children sometimes hearing my voice on their iPad when doing homework by watching a video their teachers assigned. Universities are opening up course after course, and people are taking them! As Martin Weller states in chapter 1 in The Battle for Open...

One of the issues we discussed in our group during the first topic was how to approach blogging as an educator. I've worked as a teacher for 17 years, all of which I've used webpages and blogs for different purposes. I would like to share some of my thoughts about this. On how to approach blogging as an educator: Define the purpose of the blog . Is it to inform students of homework, assignments and important tests? Is it a part of your lessons used to flip the classroom or give assignments that they work with during classes? Are the students supposed to just read the blog or are they supposed to interact with you and each other in the comment sections? Or are it just a way of documenting what you do in class so their parents can follow their work? Look at other teacher blogs . What are they doing that inspires you? How are they using the tool? Practise make perfect. Before launching your blog, make a few posts just to familiarise yourself with the tool. If you ...

How do one present oneself for a course like this? What is relevant for people to know? My personal identity, my professional identity, or my digital identity?  Even though my personal identity might be interesting for people, it doesn't feel like it should be my first priority. I'm not sure how much I would like to share yet, so I guess that part of me is off the table for now. My professional identity is probably a bit more relevant, but it's closely tied to my digital identity and I can't really tell you about one without mentioning the other. So, for this post, I'll focus on the digital identity. I would say that using Prensky's typology I'd be considered a digital immigrant . I wasn't born into the digital world like digital natives , because it didn't really exist the way it does now. But when I read about how the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants might manifest itself, like how immigrants turn to the interne...