Bricolage

This blog post completes an e-learning subject in my masters degree in adult education at UTS. Nominally it is to direct my lecturer to an assignment – posted on a private Ning.

But it also to say that the learning is over so now the learning can start.

I have been reluctant to commit to a blog in the past because i feared that I would not be able to come up with enough material to post regularly. In this subject i have learned otherwise.

I also had some questions about what would make interesting reading. My area of interest is adult learning, in particular experiential learning. I also have some rather strong views on what makes a presentation interesting. A third area of interest is making the findings of adult learning researchers accessible to people whose most positive memory of a classroom is leaving it.

This subject has given me plenty of material to work with in each of those areas.

I have also learned about new tools, in particular wikis, RSS feeds and aggregators.

I am setting up a private wiki to allow a number of trainers to develop assessment materials to meet some national competencies. Without the collaborative experience that went into making the JuJu wiki that a team of us developed for the course, that idea would never have seen the light of day.

I also intend to use Jing to develop five minute explanations of software features – primarily for my clients, but links will be posted on a public netvibes page. I doubt that I would have found the tool or the content without the course. I also intend to move a directory of on line tools there from my current public page. If those pages are not up yet, they will be shortly.

The most valuable part of the learning, though, was the people.

I participated in the best team I have ever worked with. And it was on line – a virtual team. We came from a variety of backgrounds and had a range of objectives. We were a truly self managing team.

I will have more to say on the reasons i believe that the term worked together so well in future posts. But the most valuable piece of learning from the whole course was that virtual teams work.

Thanks to all who helped me learn that. I look forward to hearing how your implementation of our learning develops.

It was great JuJu.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 7:29 pm and is filed under social learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.