I've decided to create this blog to parallel what I'm asking the teachers in my online course, Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web, to do. The goal is to have a reflective log of course activities - my thoughts on teaching the course, how participants are responding, and what changes if any I feel I need to make.
This will be a running experiment, conducted publicly, so it's both interesting and intimidating. Teachers are often very demanding students - teaching is, after all, our job - and we can be very critical of how others teach. I'm hoping that this collaborative learning environment will work for all of us.
Some of my initial reflections are that I feel very lucky to have teachers who have had some online coursework before in this course. It's far easier than a previous online technology course with teachers who did not have that experience. More than half the class was able to get online on Nicenet within the first few days; I'm hoping the rest will post in the next day or two. At the same time, I'm well aware that the infrastructure for most of the participants is not good. Long delays while online, power and Internet outages, and the general issues brought by war are all major constraints.
The SurveyMonkey needs analysis will also be helpful in letting me see how much people know about different areas, thus how much time we'll need to spend getting set up to learn about them.
All in all, working toward student and teacher autonomy will be very interesting!
I've added a short welcome message as an mp3 file - please let me know if you are able to hear it.
--Deborah
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