Reflective Journal 2

Ok, the date gives me away. I am working ahead and I will most certainly elaborate on this second reflection as time moves on.

This second module really provides an excellent background for contextualizing:



I found the reading dealing with authenticity provocative as I considered this in the framework of a constructivist view of learning. I am still sorting through a set of reservations about the constructivist paradigm - students learning incorrect information, students reinforcing "bad" habits or skills, as well as many other "issues".

Having said that, I certainly agree that learning and assessment should be real world or authentic and that the experience of learning must be personally relevant.

The 7 Things you should know about blogs covered familiar territory and blogging as accelerated since this Educause article was written. I "discovered" blogging about 2 1/2 years ago when I learned that the author of one of the text's I use - Greg Mankiw - had a blog directed toward students of economics. Since then, I have followed a number of blogs dealing with economic education, economics in general and economic research and theory.

Click here if you are interested in the current top 10 economics blogs. All 10 are on my follow list, Greg Mankiw's blog drifts from number 1 to 3.

The Lee/Allen short article describing Edublogs as an assessment tool reflects our study of alternative assessments as authentic measures as well as a constructivist approach to both teaching and learning. I see this modeled on Greg Mankiw's blog and have found that, as my blogging is in isolation, the evaluation is a self evaluation, if that makes any sense.

The Wang/Fang article outlining the benefits of cooperative learning in the weblog arena demonstrate, the potential that blogs and wiki have for integrating cooperative learning into the online world of teaching and learning. I am thinking back to the outstanding week 1 online discussion in our class dealing with the challenges, frustrations, confusions, and in general cognitive dissonance in wiki use in module 1 and processing and discussing these reactions.

First, the above helps us tremendously to experience directly what our online students experience. Second, I think that this entire wiki/blog environment (and the reaction that we all felt in module 1 to wiki to varying degrees) is evidence of the internal process of active, engaged constructivist learning. This is hard work, and, as we soldiered through this hard territory, I could not help but wonder how many of my online students (community college students) would stay the course?

Back to Wang/Fang - a downside of their argument, many of my online students have a high level of resistance to cooperative experiences in the online world. I think that the blob/wiki approach might address some but not all of this resistance and I am anxious to see what my classmates in EDUC 762 say.


I have been very engaged in blogging (obviously) as well as wiki. I did develop my own wiki for EDUC 760 - E Learning For Educators and I intend to incorporate my own learning portfolio from our class into that environment.

However, I did create this blog as a response to the module 2 assignments which I have linked to the wiki above. This process was familiar to me as I have used blogspot to create 3 previous blogs. I was so pleased that my instructor Datta Kaur was the first to post a comment to the blog.

Greg

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