Tuesday 21 April 2015

H800 so far....

H800 had a slow start for me. I was very enthused for the first couple of weeks, and then work commitments took over for a few weeks. That led to a situation where I had to almost cram for the first assignment. Luckily, I have already completed the E891 Educational Enquiry module, and so the education theories that I learned in that module made the cramming a little bit easier. It is not a strategy that I intend to rely on again, though!

I have found that the amount of learning material on H800 is large. The number of Activities each week far exceeds what I have experienced with the Open University in the past. For that reason, I find that I have to be a little bit selective in which Activities that I engage with when I am caught for time. I hope that with my Summer holidays from work coming up fast, that I will be able to spend more time on the Activities than I have been able to so far.

Some of the articles that we have had to read are relatively out of date, I would say. This is more of a reflection on the pace of educational technology than on the course leaders and the design team....technology is moving very fast, arguably much faster than the research on it can move.

In terms of the technology that I've used directly within the module, I've had a mixed experience. The discussion forums have been the most useful to me, although the asynchronous nature of them has meant they are not as dynamic as tech such as the live discussions. My issue with the live discussions is more technical than academic: my Apple Mac updated Flashplayer and made the chat box on the live discussions practically disappear, it became so small. Also, I had issues with a non-working microphone at one point, which greatly limited my contribution to the discussion.

Other tech which we have been asked to look at so far has been mixed too. I found that Cloudworks was fine in principle, but poor in execution and practically extinct in terms of users. Testament to how quickly that tech moves on, I suppose. We've also been asked to look at social bookmarking tools, such as Diigo and Delicious. I browse a lot on my iPhone, and neither of these platforms perform well as apps. I'm looking into Tumblr at the moment, to see if that would work well as a social bookmark app on my phone.

More to follow......

2 comments:

  1. True Wayne, so true... the Technology moves so fast, research cannot pick up on it. The amount of work which I am putting in, is so far beyond what I have ever done on an OU course (took a B.Sc. (hons) Psych with the OU).
    Also having studied E891 before, good to bring in the 'fundamentals' of good TMA writing practice.
    Am enjoying very much your comments and posts in our TGF, I very much liked what you did for your Learning Design activity.
    Thanks.
    Let's keep on studying and pursue on doing blog-potty-training ✌
    cu, Nicole

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the reply Nicole.

    ReplyDelete