Closing summaries: me

Hi all,

First of all, a big thanks to the course coordinators and all those that I shared my exploration of social learning with.

Looking at others' final reflections, I would agree about the time element. Sometimes it could take a while to get to grips with an application and then there is the reading and commenting on postings.

The organisation of 'dripfeed' learning modules worked well and the support materials for each application were useful. The tutor support was excellent, and keen and enthusiastic responses were always forthcoming.

In some ways I'm not sure how far we got, for example on pirvacy.

I would have liked a stronger emphasis on taking something from the course. I think the group project had the potential for this. Potentially a clear discussion at the start about participant's teaching and learning areas and how they would adopt certain applications for certain contexts. This could then include a really solid statement/resource (like the group project asked for) - in this way we might be able to leave the course with a bank of materials.

I'm not sure how effective distance learning is for this. It was made clear at the start that 6 hours was needed, but this was seemed difficult to coordinate in terms of group work. I had a recent institutional event on e-learning and through a talk and hands-on workshops I was able to comfortably get to grips with wikis and blogs in a short amount of time.

The same would probably have gone for the group project (having a conversation rather than dispersed bullet points). This may mean forgoing the international aspect, but I didn't get a strong sense of it anyway.

Overall, the beginning weeks were very exciting with a flurry of activity. This was a really interesting time and a lot of the discussion points, links, etc. will be I imagine very helpful in my future work.

Cheers and best wishes for the future

Dan