Wenger-Trayner new website – new BEtreats

In 2011, I was very fortunate to be able to attend BEtreat, in the home of Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner in Grass Valley, California. This was a unique and unforgettable experience and one that I am still reflecting on and learning from.

What is BEtreat?  This is what was written on the website last year:

‘In a collaborative atmosphere with a small, strategically committed group, we spend four intensive days developing leadership and facilitation capabilities for cultivating communities of practice and networks.

Together we push our current practice, explore the state of the art, and produce resources to address our respective challenges.

BEtreat is a hands-on, practice-oriented gathering of network and communities of practice professionals, who work closely together in a collegial learning environment. The number is kept small so that we can address in depth the specific issues and challenges brought in by people who are there.

This intensive but collegial learning environment will provide you with a unique professional development opportunity:

You will be the first to hear about the latest developments in the field

You will interact with peers who face similar challenges in a variety of contexts

You will be able to build your own network and expand your horizon by hearing what others are doing

You will be able to bring your specific challenges to the table, engage the collective brainpower of the group, and come back with new ideas and solutions

We end these four intensive days of working and learning with a party.

BEtreat is a unique workshop. If one is in charge of leading or supporting communities of practice or networks, this is the place to be for professional development.’

This year Etienne and Bev are offering three different BEtreat workshops in 2012 and starting a one-year certificate as a professional development program.

• State-of-the-art BEtreat – covering the fundamentals of the field: July 9 – 13

• Cutting-edge BEtreat – exploring advanced topics and emerging issues: July 16 – 20
• Academic BEtreat – for researchers, lecturers, and students: July 30 – August 3

• Certificate program – intensive one-year certificate: 2012 – 2013

Participation can be face-to-face or online, but for an early-bird discount, you need to sign up before Feb 1^st.

For full details see their new website: http://wenger-trayner.com

And to get a flavour of what it all involves – a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun – here is a link to the photos I took last year – http://www.flickr.com/photos/53375223@N00/sets/72157627019335585/

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Thumbs up to Big Blue Button

Well – I can give BBB the thumbs up. We had an enjoyable, informative and stimulating webinar today.

That’s not to say that there weren’t things that BBB and presenters in BBB need to think about.

I am used to Elluminate and missed some of the functionality of Elluminate – but not a lot. Three things I missed. These were:

1. Being able to write onto the whiteboard using a text box and your keyboard. Currently BBB has a drawing type tool, which is just too clumsy for participant interaction and contributions. It is really helpful if participant responses can be typed up onto the whiteboard.
2. A voting system – which is great for generating interaction. So for example, the presenter can create a slide with a number of contentious or thought provoking statements which participants need to think about and then vote on.
3. The ability to applause (clap) and smile in the participant window. I think these symbols are very important for gauging the ‘mood’ of participants.

But the advantage of BBB is that its open source. This is so important. Elluminate is very good – but is very expensive, especially for small self-funded community groups. Even HE institutions are struggling to meet the costs of Elluminate – given all the cuts that are happening at the moment.

BBB is developing and there will be increased functionality with time – but this is what I learned about using it today.

• You do need headphones and microphone to avoid echo and feedback (similar to Elluminate)
• I’m not sure how well it would work with large numbers – we had a small group and I found it difficult to see all the participants in the ‘listener’ block without a lot of scrolling up and down.
• We sought participant interaction in two ways 1) We asked participants to take the microphone and speak. 2) We asked participants to summarise discussion and upload their slides. This was a little slow – probably because we were all learning how to do it – but worked well. We found that power point slides saved as PDF worked best.

I was kicked out of BBB a couple of times. By that I mean that I lost sound and had to log out and log back in again to hear again. I did notice that changing and uploading presentations could interfere with sound – but I’m not sure why this happened.

Otherwise, the chat had exactly the same functionality as Elluminate. As yet there isn’t the facility to separate into rooms – but our group wasn’t big enough to do this anyhow.

So all in all it was a good experience – and I’m all for open source – so thanks to Big Blue Button

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Communities, Networks and Groups

A new article by Etienne Wenger, Beverley Trayner and Martin de Laat has just been linked to on Etienne’s Facebook page.

Wenger, E., Trayner, B. & de Laat, M. (2011). Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks : a conceptual framework. Centrum. http://www.social-learning-strategies.com/documents/Wenger_Trayner_DeLaat_Value_creation.pdf

This is very timely given the online course about communities of practice in HE that I will be working on with colleagues from Oxford Brookes University tomorrow.

The new publication by Wenger et al. is true to its title. It presents a framework and toolkit for assessing value creation in communities and networks. But perhaps of interest to those who follow discussions about the differences between groups and networks in relation to connectivism, will be the introductory section (pages 9-13) where the authors discuss their understanding of the terms ‘community’ and ‘network’ – how these are similar, different, overlap.

I, like many others before and after me, once asked Etienne Wenger – ‘What is the difference between a community and a network?’ His response at the time was – ‘All communities are networks, but not all networks are communities’. It is interesting to see this thinking expanded and further explained in this recent publication.

In line with this evidence of changing thinking over time (which we also see in relation to connectivism), it is interesting to read Chris Kimble’s article - Communities of Practice: Never Knowingly Undersold – written in 2006 – but still relevant to these discussions. This acknowledges the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of the term ‘community of practice’ and discusses the reasons for this and how the term ‘community of practice’ has been interpreted and understood differently over time.

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BigBlueButton Challenge

Next week (May 18th 2011) I will be working with a team, George Roberts, Rhona Sharpe, Joe Rosa (from Oxford Brookes University) and Andy Coverdale (University of Nottingham) to present a one day online course bearing the title – Benefits and challenges of communities of practice in HE

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/webinars/communities_practice/index.html

This will be interesting because I have never worked in BigBlueButton before, although I had a ‘practice’ meeting today so had a chance to become a little familiar with the technology.  BigBlue Button is an online conferencing platform. It is similar to Adobe Connect, but lacks some of the functionality of Elluminate.

I have been tasked with doing a 10 minute presentation on MOOCs (this might be controversial as I have rather strong opinions about what is and what is not a community of practice – enough said ) and also to design a 45 minute activity about the challenges for communities of practice in Higher Education. This will be interesting because, as yet, BBB does not have a voting system and does not allow for participants to write on the whiteboard – so planning for online interactivity is somewhat limited. I will have to put my ‘thinking cap’ on, as I know from experience that the most ‘fun’ sessions are those where participants can take control of their learning. I would like to try and avoid falling into the ‘teacher talks too much’ trap

So lot’s to think about, especially since I am currently working with two research groups, one on emergent learning and the other on autonomous learning – so hopefully I will have learned something from those which will be reflected in what we do in the online course.

I really need to try and ‘put my money where my mouth is’

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CCK11 Characteristics of an autonomous learner

The principles of connectivism are autonomy, diversity, connectedness and openness. Stephen has written and presented about this on a number of occasions. My experience of connectivism in MOOCs or even OOCs is that these principles are not straightforward to apply to course design or learning.

My current interest is in autonomy, as I believe that when thinking about the principles of connectivism – autonomy rules, i.e. it is not possible to experience diversity, connectedness or openness without autonomy, i.e. being an autonomous learner.

Being an autonomous learner seems to be a pre-requisite for successful participation in a MOOC/OOC – but what is an autonomous learner? Are you an autonomous learner? Am I an autonomous learner? Are our students/colleagues/children/friends autonomous learners? How do we know? What are the characteristics of an autonomous learner?

I have spent a bit of time trawling the web and journals with this question in mind and there has been loads written about autonomous learning, much of it in relation to language teaching (haven’t quite got to the bottom of why language teaching yet).  I have been wondering whether learners who participate in MOOCs/OOCs have unique characterstics in relation to autonomous learning – and I invite anyone who ventures here to read this blog post to join me in thinking about this – if you are interested. For me the design of a course based on connectivism principles will have to take account of the characteristics of autonomous learning – hence my desire to get my head round this.

So far I have come up with the following characteristics – the problem is that few of them could be said to be specific to MOOCs/OOCs.

Autonomous learners….

• show responsibility for their own learning
• show initiative
• are able to monitor and evaluate their own learning
• are reflective and show ‘high’ (in inverted comments because I’m not sure how high is high) levels of metacognition
• are self-aware in relation to their own learning (need unpicking)
• are intrinsically motivated
• are life-long learners (not sure about this one)
• can manage and regulate their own learning (OK but what does this involve?)
• are adept at taking/making decisions (how adept is adept?)
• are meaning makers
• are risk takers (not sure about this one)
• have specific skills and strategies for managing their learning online (OK but what skills and strategies?)
• are adaptable and flexible in their approach to learning (how adaptable is adaptable and how flexible is flexible? How would these characteristics manifest themselves?)
• are pro-active (i.e. they don’t wait for things/people to come to them)
• are critical and analytical thinkers (this might be too much of a supposition)
• know how to ask questions (and ideally good questions – but what is a good question?)
• are good at filtering and selecting the information they need
• can take constructive criticism
• can navigate the web
• are technically adept (not sure about this)

I am aware that each one of these characteristics could be questioned. After all how autonomous is autonomous?

If you think autonomy is important to learning in MOOCs/OOCs, then I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

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Learner Autonomy – First thoughts about Stephen Downes’ model

(Stephen Downes’ model in black font) Overall question which I shall come back to later is: How do the recent MOOC/open course designs foster learner autonomy and from the learner perspective, are they successful in this?

A – Factors affecting epistemic states

- empirical factors

- external

- past experience and memory

- current experience

- internal

- emotional state

- pain and suffering, etc

- fear

- psychological

- traumas

- phobias

- philias or needs

I interpret this to mean that any consideration of autonomy must recognise that learners bring with them prior experience on at least three levels. This has a ‘constructivist’ learning theory feel to it. The ways in which learners recognise, interpret and experience autonomy will be influenced by their prior experience. Learners can probably be helped with these by their ‘teachers’ because they are externally recognisable and ‘measurable’.

- cognitive factors

- world view or belief set

- frames or traces – recognition of ranges of alternatives

- metaphors or underlying models

- causation, spirit, or other mechanisms

- morality, sense of agency, responsibility

- reasoning mechanism (if any), including:

- logical capacities (including modal, probabilistic)

- mathematical capacities

- degree of certainty attained, required

- language – languages learned, vocabulary

I interpret this to mean that a learner’s experience of autonomy, or ability to act autonomously (bearing in mind that this is not a constant state) is influenced by their ‘internal’ mental state, frames of reference. This may not be visible to the teacher and therefore may be harder to influence, from a teacher’s perspective.

- external factors

- rewards and incentives

- financial

- intrinsic or non-financial

- punishments, sanctions and threats

- expectations

- professional standards

- organizational vision or strategy

From my initial and brief reading of related research, this is related to motivation. My personal perspective is that truly autonomous learning relies heavily on intrinsic motivation, in the absence of punishments, sanctions, threats and expectations. That’s not to say that these external factors do not exist, but that learners must be in a position to choose to reject the extrinsic in favour of the intrinsic or vice vers

B – Capacity to act on epistemic states

- physical factors

- mobility and location

- perceptual (can you see, is there light?)

- effective (can you project into the environment – do the buttons respond, do the pages turn, etc)

- physical support – housing, health, nutrition, etc

- time

This seems to relate to ‘independent’ learning – which has been raised in past research. Autonomy is interpreted in a variety of ways and independence is one of those. My husband is disabled and I know the importance of independence as a pre-requisite to autonomy. They are not the same thing. The conditions have to be right in order to be able to make decisions/choices. This is interesting and I am still thinking about it.

- social factors

- laws, rules and regulations, including flexibility of these

- peer pressure, mores, threat of sanctions

- mode of collaboration – authoritarian, democratic, consensus,         deliberative, etc

- leadership – capacities, temperament, inclinations, etc

- responsibility or authority

This relates to the social constraints of our personal circumstances – so for example my mother married an extremely Victorian man who believed that women should not go out to work – her role was to support her husband (which she did extremely effectively) – but her autonomy in terms of her choice over how she could express her talents was controlled by someone else. Whilst this particular example might not be so common today – autonomy can be restricted in these circumstances.

- structural factors

- predictability of the environment

- complexity of the environment

- barriers, locks, detours, traps, loops – eg. http://tihane.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/motivationalbarriers_seci.jpg

I interpret this as relating to organisational constraints. The organisation in which a learner works may not be able/capable of coping with autonomous learners. An example of this is when University staff are not permitted to use certain softwares within their courses. There might be good institutional reasons for this but it stifles innovation and learner autonomy.

- resources

- range and depth of resources available

- medium of resources – staff, money, equipment

- language and complexity of resources

- quantity of resources (eg., finances)

- mode of presentation of those resources

- sequence of presentation

- duration of presentation

This is similar to the above point in relation to organisations. My son who is doing music technology and cannot do the modules he wants to because of lack of University resources (staffing) is an example of constraints on learner autonomy. But there will also be other constraints on a personal level. In CCK08 and other open courses we have seen how participants whose first language is not English experience constraints on their autonomy. I’m assuming that mode of presentation might be related to ‘learning styles’ although I know that some people don’t believe that there are such things as learning styles. Shall we call them learning preferences instead?

C – Scope and Range of Autonomous Behaviour

- expression

- medium of expression

- language of expression, word use

- association and assembly

- definition of size, scope of social network

- directionality of communications

- selection

- of associates – can you choose your friends? Family?

- communication options – do channels exist? Can they be open?

- of tools, eg., of software, hardware

- resource allocation – spending, delegating, assigning, etc

- method

- operating principle, methodology, pedagogy

- background – influence over environmental factors generally, including:

- noise or music

- colour scheme or visual appearance

- lighting, air supply, mobility

- range

- tolerance – allowed range of results or effects

- quantity of choices available

- quality of choices available (cf. Hobson’s choice)

This section seems to me about the choices that learners can make and the extent of those choices. CCK11 has probably offered more choice than any prior open course. My brief reading of research however indicates that designing for autonomy does not mean that teachers abdicate responsibility for their learners and I will be interested to see how the CCK11 course design balances learner autonomy with ‘teacher’ facilitation and whether even minimum teacher facilitation will be perceived as a constraint.

D – Effects of Autonomous Behaviour

- impact (ie., the degree or scope of the effect)

- audience – range of persons affected by behavior

- efficacy – amount of change potentially caused by behaviour

- improvement (ie., the nature of the effect)

- internal

- psychological – satisfaction, lessening of pain,lessening of fear, etc

- cognitive – beliefs formed, knowledge acquired

- external

- material condition, employment, etc

- capacities, rights, autonomy, etc

- associative – improvements ascribed to others

- social – improvements to society generally

This section feels to me a bit of a departure – it is not about what autonomy might mean to the learner or how autonomy is experienced, but how we might ‘measure’ its effects. How will we know when we are autonomous learners? How will teachers know that their course designs which attempt to promote autonomous learning are successful?

This is my first response to Stephen’s model. I am aware that I have probably not done it justice.  I now want to see how CCK11 and other open courses have been designed with these ideas in mind and also how this model compares with the other models that Stephen posted on his blog.

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#PLENK2010 Reflective Learning

Reflective learning came up in the weekly round up Elluminate session today and Stephen asked Rita to expand on her understanding of reflective learning. It was one of those situations, where I was so busy trying to find my own response to Stephen’s question, that  I completely dropped out of Elluminate into my own thoughts – so apologies if this post crosses or repeats what has been said.

Every year I work, as a tutor on an online distance learning reflective learning course ( a short course – only 4 weeks), run by Oxford Brookes University,  which is based on the work of Jenny Moon and on which Jenny Moon is a tutor. The course is usually fairly small, numbers below 20, which is ideal for the subject, but we get participants from around the world, and it is always highly thought provoking and stimulating. People who attend the course already have a deep interest in the reflective learning process, and I love the course because I learn so much from them.

Today Stephen asked Rita to explain what she meant by reflective learning. This is a question that we ask our course participants, and which I have thought about deeply, since as a tutor on the course, I also share my own definition. My definition has developed a bit over the years, according to the reading I have done and also in response to participants on the course who have sometimes challenged my definition – but currently this is my thinking:

‘My own understanding (I hesitate to use the word ‘definition’) of reflection/reflective learning is that it is the process of thinking about my own thinking, actions or learning, with a view to gaining a deeper understanding of them and improving them, so that I can see the evidence in changed behaviour. This thinking will also involve examining my emotional response and how my feelings have influenced my thinking, actions and learning. To make this reflection significant, I need to mark it in some way, by talking about it or better still recording it in written form. Finally, I need to revisit the marked events at some later stage and note whether my learning has improved/moved on.’

This definition is based on the work of Jenny Moon and also on the work of John Mason, who have influenced my thinking and to whom I am grateful for their insights.

• Moon J (2006) Learning Journals. Routledge Falmer
• Moon J (2005) A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning. Routledge Falmer

• Moon J (2005) We seek it here…a new perspective on the elusive activity of critical thinking. Escalate Discussion Series
• Mason, J (2002) Researching Your own Practice. The Discipline of Noticing. Routledge Falmer

Every year, I keep a blog in conjunction with the course  - Reflective Learning with Reflective Learners. The next course will run March 2nd to April 2nd 2011. Although it is only short, it is intensive and I always learn a lot from the course participants, which helps to keep my thinking about reflective learning alive and prevent me from forgetting its relevance to teaching and learning in general.

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Cognition

This is the subject of Week 1 (which has already whizzed by) of the Critical Literacies online open course. In the course materials on Moodle, cognition is described as:

The capacity to infer, or detect faulty inferences, to use communicative elements in order to describe, argue, explain or define. Including the power of reflection, authority of knowledge, stability of knowledge, communication as conversation or as dialogue.

I am attending the course not only for the content on Critical Literacies, but also because I am interested in how open courses are designed and run. What is so intriguing is that the design of an open course cannot predict what participants will run with, what will grab their interest, what discussions will ensue, who will participate etc. So the quote above outlines what it was expected that we might discuss/engage with, but did we?

The discussion in Moodle about the evolving definition of  ’expert’ generated quite a bit of interest.  Rita asked some great questions:

• Who decides what information we can access, and how is it ordered.
• Whose interests are served by providing particular information?
• Does the (sub-)structure of the Web give us access to the ‘experts’, the most knowledgeable others, or to the people who are best at self-publicising?
• Does it really matter? Or is it most important that people gain an awareness and understanding of these structures and the ability to assess sources of information?
• Do people take for granted each word that is written down, or do they analyse what claims and conclusions people draw and if they are based on any substance or on thin air?

This aligns with ‘authority of knowledge’ from the quote above. The power of reflection and the stability of knowledge topics have only been touched on – unless it’s in someone’s blog post somewhere and I’ve missed it – but having this in the quote suggests that Critical Literacies include the ability to judge whether the author has the authority to talk/write about the subject, which is what Howard Rheingold highlights in his video. I haven’t quite got my head round why ‘stability of knowledge’ is linked to Critical Literacies. Are we supposed to be able to judge whether knowledge is stable or not?

So coming back to the ‘open course’ and participants ‘following their own lines of inquiry’ model, how am I to know whether the power of reflection and/or not knowing where ‘stability of knowledge’ fits with Critical Literacies is important or not.

We are already moving on to Week 2 Change – which is described as:

The capacity to reason dynamically, to detect and comprehend processes and flows, to understand the impact of progressions and differences, to reason employing dynamic events such as games and simulations.

As someone who does design online courses from time to time, it’s always very difficult to know how long to spend on each topic and to get the balance between breadth and depth – and of course, as always, you can’t suit all the people all the time!

So far, the course is well worth the time I am spending on it.

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Open learning advance organisers

The opening synchronous meeting for the Critical Literacies course was very interesting, as unlike for CCk08 where we just pitched in and sank or swam, here we were given advice on how we might go about learning on this course.

The overall message was the same. It is an open course. We can and should pick and choose when, where, how, what and with whom we learn – all as in CCK08. We can come and go as we want – but Stephen suggested that we take part in 4 activities:

• Aggregate
• Remix
• Repurpose
• Feedforward

Aggregate: gather content using Google reader (www.google.com/reader). The course newsletter (The Daily) is an example of aggregation. I don’t use Google reader. Perhaps I should. I have found in the past that it just fills up with stuff that I never look at. Perhaps I am not using it correctly.

Remix: Pick and choose from the content and find a way of recording/keeping track of this, e.g. using an online bookmark tracker such as Delicious, or create a blog, or take screenshots and post on Flickr or record yourself on video. I have a Delicious account, but its another thing that I tend to put stuff in and then never look at again. I already have this and two other blogs. I also have a Flickr account but I do not use it for work purposes. Me and video do not go together. I am camera shy!

Repurpose: Recreate content for your own purposes. There are 4 major ways of repurposing

• Describe/description – ( the simplest kind of critical literacy)
• Infer/ argumentation, inference, drawing conclusions, responding – taking what you have and moving beyond it
• Explain/ explanation – to go beyond appearance – identify underlying forces that make things the way they are
• Define – to assign meanings to words (this is needed for all the others)

All 4 things play a different role. They form all of your cognition – every sentence – everything you think falls in one of these 4 things.

Critical Literacies are not simply critical – they are creative – they are about adding value to content

Feedforward: Presentation of work and sharing rather than competing. Produce learning materials for other people to aggregate, remix, repurpose and feedforward, so starting the cycle again.

This seems to me a useful way of thinking about how to work online.

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Taking stock

My understanding is that by ‘connectivism’ we mean that knowledge is distributed across a network and that learning is the ability to access that knowledge through navigating the connections in the network. I think that’s the essence of it.

This assumes that we know what knowledge means, which is in doubt judging by the forum discussions. I can see that there is information in the network. It only becomes knowledge for me when I can make sense of it. That whole discussion in the Moodle forums around externalisation left me floundering.

Is connectivism a new learning theory? To answer this we need to agree what we mean by learning theory. From the 78 posts in the Moodle forum it appears that this is also a difficult task and there is little agreement. Personally I like the explanation provided by Stephen Hawking and quoted on Wikipedia but this relates to science so I’m not sure how helpful it is in relation to connectivism? I think connectivism provides a framework in which to think about learning, but whether this makes it a theory or not I wouldn’t like to say.

In addition I couldn’t possibly say whether connectivism is  a ‘new’  learning theory without knowing a lot more about existing learning theories and it seems to me that that could be a life-time’s work. I think you could say it’s a new perspective on learning – but does that make it a theory? So – all in all –  yes – the concept of theory may be distracting (to answer the assignment question , which incidentally I am not doing).

What are the strengths? Does connectivism resonate with your learning experiences? If so, how?

 

As a practical way of working/ learning, connectivism clearly makes sense in many ways. Technology is developing fast and the world is becoming a ‘smaller’ place. It’s quick and easy to connect with people from all over the world – although we shouldn’t assume that this is the case everywhere, see Frances Bell’s post (See- Re: What happened to you in the history of the social web? – Saturday, 4 October 2008, 08:54 AM) in the Moodle forum and Maru’s post on her blog. For those who do have access to the web, there is a whole world of information to tap into. The skill needed is in knowing how to do this, how to select the information we need and how to assimilate the information. I know that I can ‘google’ any information I need. I know I can also access networks for any information I need. However, accessing information doesn’t equal learning.

 

What are the weaknesses of connectivism as formulated in this course?

 

I can’t comment on weaknesses, but I can comment on where connectivism doesn’t resonate with my learning experience – and that is in personal contact. On this course I have made an attempt to ‘connect’. I skim read the Moodle forums – but I  ‘feel’ little connection there, either with the ideas being discussed or with the people. I read a number of blogs, and whilst many posts resonate with my own experience, I have only made very loose connections with people who have either commented on my blog or where I have commented. Connecting through blogs is a slow and laborious business. Blogs were not designed for this. Where I feel more connected is in the synchronous Elluminate and Ustream sessions. There I get some sense of who is on this course and I think that I learn most through these sessions. I can connect more easily with the ideas. But this is the most traditional aspect of the course in terms of teaching and learning, i.e. ‘the lecture’ for ‘the group’. So what does that say about learning in networks, or to qualify – ‘my’ learning in networks?

 

So is connectivism any more than a by-product of advancing technologies? To me it is obvious that there is just too much information accessible by too many to continue with an education system which relies on ‘the teacher’ to be the source of knowledge. The role of the teacher will have to change and is already changing in many cases – but to what? And if there continues to be a role for teachers, then since teacher and learner are linked, the role of the learner will also change. The inverse will also be the case in that changing learners will necessitate changing teaching. So my outstanding questions are around this relationship.

So, what have been the key learning points for me so far:

1. It is possible to have an open access course for 2000+ participants, provided you have one or more people to manage the technology

2. That Blogs are not good for conversation (I only didn’t know this because I have never tried it before – it never occurred to me that anyone would want to do this. In the past, I have always used blogs for personal reflection.)

3. That forums are subject to ‘trolls’ (I realise that I have been very fortunate in my prior online learning not to have experience of this)

4. That networks don’t support the affective elements of learning (this is obvious, but I have not been involved in any networks before)

5. That for me, the affective elements of learning are very important

6. When the Moodle server is down you can’t find the links for your post!

7. That it’s possible to spend a lot of time not getting very far despite having made efforts to connect!

 

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