I had to give up the course. There was no way I could handle the course, Kristina, my relation, myself and stay sane. So, fresh start for this blog I think. From now on, just for fun.

I must be this course worst participant ever. Not only am I lagging behind in reading, not participating in forums or commenting blogs (yet, I need to say, it is still my intention to start contributing, I’ll deal with why I haven’t in a later post) but also I don’t seem to be able to handle any of the medias in a correct way.

I just realized (or rather, something I suspected a long time was now confirmed) that I failed the first task in this course: to submit my feed. Uuuuhh, how utterly butterly embarrassing…. I thought I added it, but that must have been in my moodle profile.

So, if any of my fellow classmates find their way here for the first time, this is me in short:

• Name: Agneta
• Location: Stockholm, Sweden
• Age: 38 but pretending to be much younger by wearing lilac nailpolish today

• Why this course: Job interest, work for a swedish VLE and wan’t to keep up with thoughts and ideas related to online learning. Further, an attempt to get some influences from the ”grownup world”. Since I am on parental leave with my 5 month old daughter, the rest of the days are all about nursing, diapers, nursery rhymes etc.
• Is connectivism a learning theory: I must have missed the part explaining why it is so important stating whether it’s a learning theory or not????

To continue my confessions on media/technology failures, I also struggled with:

My blogg : so many things that I couldn’t get that I blush thinking about it. First, the structure (pages versus postings), then categories vs tags etc etc

Pageflakes: never succeeded in making my page useful, had problems with gmail (it’s just loading and loading). And each time I visit the page my computer starts sounding like a harvester. How can that be? Is it just a coincidence?

Second life: got tired since I never managed to get my avatar a new dress… (now I’m really getting embarrassed)

CMAP: still struggling with the arrows and boxes but starting to get the hang of it

Thinking about it I realize that I’ve probably given up WAY to easy, giving myself to little time to understand ”how to”. I’ve also been doing the ”homework” late at nights, when my daughter is asleep and the housework is done so I’ve probably been neither focussed or sharp… Oh, I feel bitter about myself.

And then the ”later” part explaining why I still haven’t participated in the forum discussions or commented my fellow participants blogs. There are several reasons:

* Since I’m not exactly an A student I don’t really feel I have anything of interest (or anything at all) to contribute.

* I feel a bit shy (which is very strange since I’m not shy at all IRL)

* The language… it’s really bothering me that I find it so hard to express myself in english. That MA year in London feels like a very very very long time ago (and it was, eight to be specific)…

Well, enough confessions for this friday evening. Now that I’ve (hopefully) managed to add my feed I might just look at Pageflakes again. And perhaps login for the second time to Second life….

Annons

Just read ”A history of the social web” by Trebor Scholz and it was SO interesting. Among many things that I started to think of:

* So many swedish initiatives! Heard of them of course but did not know that they were so ”early”

* The dot.com industry has forever changed the expectations of how a workplace should be and function (for those employed in the industry). In a good way. (”But there is an additional positive effect of the dotcom bubble. For a short period, a section of the techno-workforce experienced a new kind of work conditions, which were mostly favorable in the sense that the hierarchies in a dotcom company were less pronounced and the work environment was more casual. While many of these knowledge workers lost their job, they took this experience with them when entering the job market again.”)

* all the talk about network with nodes (”all the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages.”) made me think of the Dharma Initiative. When does the next season of Lost start??.

This week is lost. My daughter has been sick and is still not totally recovered. I got it from her and lay totally wasted for two days. We are recovering but slow. Will have to 3 & 4 next week. Even more important to prioritize in a wise way.

This weeks reading has focused on epistemology and the question of what Knowledge is. I got to say that this will probably not be my favourite topic during this course. I’m more inclined to the implications of the theory (or not theory), and meaning of knowledge – that is, what does this in reality mean for teaching and learning. This, paired with my 4-month old daughter being ill, kept my activity lever quite low.

However, the article on rhizomatic knowledge I thought was very interesting, also quite down-to-earth which is good for someone outside the academia like myself.

Another interesting thing was Stevens bloggpost on (among other things) ”trolls” in discussion foras and how they can skew and halt discussions. Steven writes ”In a blog network, each person controls his or her own blog. So it is not possible for a troll to dump on everyone.”. I never thought about this before, but it is definately a good argument in favor of using blogs. On the other hand, making a greater number of participants take part in discussion via comments on eachothers blogs requires more planning and set up than just starting a discussion forum in a LMS.

The daily is still of great help, helping me sort through postings and topics. I try to check moodle and FB aswell, but not in a very structured manner I’m afraid.

Week three will deal with networks! Sounds like fun!

Oh, and I just realised that instead of tagging my posts with CCK08 I’ve been categorizing them (blushing of embarrassement…)

George Siemens posted this question on the Connectivism blog yesterday:

What has been your experience? Has the intentional absense of a narrative of coherence completely overwhelmed you? Or have you begun to engage in processes to make sense of the complexity on your own terms?

Yes and no. At first I was quite frustrated and tried – a bit desperate – to get control over the situation and the workload. Then I realized that 1) it was not in any way possible to be in control, 2) it was neccessary to prioritize among information & to find my own way of collecting it, and 3) that there are appr. 1899 wonderful CCK08 participants out there to help me understand the coursework, reading, technology etc. Since I got that I feel much better:-)

After four days I think I’m starting to get a clear(er) picture. It has been foggy until now with all the information & sources of information. I also had to struggle a bit with the subject in itself. Have to admit (now, after four days…), that I jumped into the course without the faintest idea of Connectivism. Never ever heard the term before. There, now it’s out in the open… (I’m blushing a bit)…

However, after going through some of the reading and in a very unstructured manner jumping from blogs, to forums, via links to new blogs, to FB, 2nd life, twitter, moodle etc etc I think I starting to get a grip of at least some. And I find it highly interesting!

However I still struggle with the scope. How do I manage and structure the enormous amount of information? What forums (foras?) will do it for me? Should I try to cover moodle & FB? Find some favourite blogs? How about 2nd life? Haven’t even come round to creating an account there yet… Everything I’ve done so far (but the reading) has been done in a very random manner. This will be the challenge of tomorrow:-)

A note on something nice: Today I received a mail from another stockholmian participant (Robin)! Hopefully we can find time to get together 🙂

Just had to try it:-)

Anto showed how to do it. It should be a category not a page! So I’m making CCK08 a category on my sjohast blog and will try to move earlier posts here! Thanks Anto for inspiration!