Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Creating a Digital Artifact #edcmooc

So here I am creating my first blog post ever! Thank you e-Learning and Digital Cultures @ The University of Edinburg!

#edcmooc



This is both thrilling and terrifying at the same time. What do I have to contribute to the incredible collection of information available on the web? The knowledge and detailed expression of that knowledge by many of my colleagues in this e-Learning and Digital Cultures mooc is very intimidating.

Among the many other factors that have prevented my personal contribution and engagement in the Blogosphere are: I can't be offering anything new, and I find writing very tedious. Being a kinesthetic learner I much prefer a good conversation, a play or an opera, and using more than one of the many popular communication platforms just seems too much like multi-tasking, an unproductive practice to this human being. On day 2 I really am a bit perplexed by tweeting, and rss and a few other things. I know it will get better.

In the past six years I've been tasked with the challenges of supporting instructors (most of them lifelong learners who eschew computers and technology) to turn their instructional design inside out and put it on the web.

I witness many of these scholars and subject matter experts experience a nightmarish anxiety dream where the live, extemporaneous lecture is dead and their day by day on the fly lesson plans float up into thin air. It isn't very pretty especially because there seems to be little structural support to expand the instructors skills. The instructors suffer terribly and, more importantly, the students are not given a learning experience of much value at all. 

It is the dystopian nightmare, and I am expected to facilitate the emergence from the nightmare. I am eager to experience a transformation of my approach to the teaching and learning process that integrates a human approach to this seemingly mechanized and heartless process.

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