Starting a Reflective Journal

Oh dear!
I'm really not the best at blogging! I find my personal stuff goes onto Facebook and recording some of my professional discoveries goes into Twitter, but I seldom sit down and consciously reflect on what I'm learning or doing and how that impacts on my professional practice.
I'm into the last few units of my Diploma of Training Design and Development and one of the assessment tasks is a reflection journal:

Undertake a reflective process throughout this course of current facilitation and assessment practice, include:

o   Techniques and strategies you have developed appropriate to professional practice

o   How you apply ethical and inclusive practices in professional practice

o   Reflection on professional practice of current knowledge and skills against appropriate benchmarks

o   Networking with colleagues, peers and other practitioners 

So, time to start actually documenting, rather than just doing and thinking.

As a first, here's a short Storify documenting some of the process of preparing for our Learning and Teaching Week in September. In preparing for the sessions I'll be facilitating I've drawn heavily on contacts through my Professional Learning Network (mostly through Twitter), and have had to learn how to use Storify - which actually wasn't hard at all. One of the things we want to share with staff is the enormous benefit of being part of an open community and I'm hoping they will see the genuine willingness of others to share resources and provide additional support through this Storify.

Curating - #BYOD4L

Hmmmmm.

As those who know me will testify, I kinda like to have my stuff all around me. Putting stuff away just isn't my strong point. And it's pretty much the same with curating. I see a website I like and "click" it's in my favourites. I currently have 12 active tabs on the iPad and 15 on the phone! But how to bring this all together?! So "reflect on my current practice" - well, it's pretty much non-existent. Great! Here's an area for improvement in 2016 :)

I can relate to the teacher in the video today because our trainers all say the same. And we say the same in relation to (what we think are) exciting things we include in our online staff PD.

A couple of years ago I (with a few other colleagues) participated in Gilly Salmon's "Carpe Diem" course: A team based approach to learning design. Many of us found the template provided for designing online activities particularly helpful, including a "spark" and a "what's in it for me" as part of the activity introduction. Check it out on page 21 of the Carpe Diem workbook. It's easy for us to get excited about new things and want to share everything, so I think we need to be able to articulate that excitement so that our students also get excited and want to try new things.

So for something to improve on this year, I'm going to try to curate my "stuff". I'm trying Pocket which has been mentioned in this course, as well as giving Evernote another try. I had looked at that a few years ago and didn't find it intuitive, but was recently reintroduced to it as part of the fun 12 Apps of Christmas.

I'm looking forward to a tidier desk by the end of the year!

Communicating - #BYOD4L

Day 2 of #BYOD4L is all about communicating. Specifically, thinking about how we communicate in our professional and private lives, the methods and tools we use.

Rather than just write a list, I found this neat website to create Venn diagrams - because I was sure there would be an overlap - and there is. When I sat down to think about it, there are very few tools that I use exclusively for professional or private use, with most sitting in a blur in the middle. Some, like Facebook, started as a purely social tool, but as more and more businesses and professional bodies create pages I find it an increasingly useful way to be informed and to raise questions.

I then considered which of these tools I use of choice and which I have to use because they are work based, or because that is where to find others with whom I want to communicate. Google tools fit in this latter category with a lot of MOOCs using google as the preferred platform. I'm getting used to it, but it's not my preferred choice.

The day 2 scenarios are interesting and I relate to the educator in the second, as I often hear similar comments from our trainers and assessors: "I'm all alone", "I can't get to that PD session because I'm teaching", "My colleagues are so far away" (At CDU we have over 22,000 students across 4 campuses and 4 training centres). 

To them, and to our man in the video, I would say, "I hear what you're saying. My colleagues are 1,500 km away too. I've been able to explore using technology to help us communicate better. Let's see what might work for you." And then begins a journey of exploration ...

So for me, where to next? I've just returned from long service leave where I spent time in Nepal facilitating training in MS Word and PowerPoint with groups of community development workers in remote regions (Read about that on my other blog), and also introducing them to Twitter and Padlet and blogs. It was exciting to see their enthusiasm. I'm continuing to work with some of them individually, slowly introducing tools and apps they can use on their limited bandwidth. In my day job, I'll be continuing to explore (through courses like this) tools and apps that I can share with our trainers and assessors to help them further develop their skills and give their training sessions some "bling". Exciting times!

Learning on the move - #Fail! #BYOD4L is next.

So I didn't get to participate in #HumanMOOC. Changing locations, dodgy wifi and time zone differences all got too challenging. And then Christmas came along - and time with family was waaay more important. Hopefully #HumanMOOC will come round again.

So now back home and trying to get back into "normal" routines and I'm picking up on #BYOD4L. I lurked a bit here previously and got to share in what one of my colleagues was learning. It's a wild ride of a new topic each day for 5 days using The 5C Framework combined with Twitterchats. We're talking about Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating and Creating.

Check out the website from the image caption.

BYOD4L

Hello to HumanMOOCers

Hi from Pokhara, Nepal.
I think I've finally worked out a way to post my intro video - working round wifi access, power outages and device incompatibility is a challenge, but hopefully this link will work.
Greetings everyone!

Online learning on the move

Currently in Nepal and eager to start with #HumanMOOC. I'm hoping our travel over the next few weeks won't be too much of a barrier to my participation.

Keeping up with PD in Nepal

While we've been here in Nepal I've been surprised by how easy it has been to keep up with my professional development through a variety of online activities.

During our first week here I was able to join two sessions through Blackboard Collaborate facilitated from my own workplace, Charles Darwin University, as part of our annual Learning and Teaching Week.

I've also enjoyed participating in some of the Sunday evening #AussieED chats on Twitter and have enjoyed following the conversations around digital writing on #DigiWriMo.

Participating in Collaborate session from Pokhara