Month: April 2018

Mapping my digital use

I am not surprised that my map looks like we just took a hard right turn and sent everything flying to the left.  I often think about how much time I spend on social media and the internet in general, but how I am just observing ( visiting). I follow and keep up with multiple different accounts on social media and YouTube, but never find myself interacting with them, just watching- sounds a little creepy.

This made me realize just how separate my certain accounts are. I have always kept my emails and google account separate for work and personal, with very little overlap. For me, they serve two different purposes. I even have two instagram accounts, one open account where I share pictures of my dog and our adventures ( no pictures of me), and a private account where I share more personal ones of myself.

This brings me back to the balance of being open and sharing. I think Twitter has been my best tool for balancing the resident half and being both personal and institutional. A few years ago I use Twitter more frequently and I tried to do a mix of educational and (chosen) personal communications. I added the feed to my blog to help challenge myself to Tweet more and try to work on those connections.

I really enjoyed learning about Visitors and Residents mapping, as this is a relatively quick exercise that can lead to great discussions and reflective thought. Let me know if you have any questions.

Where do I even start?

As the Royal Roads MALAT virtual symposium has come and gone, I am left even more excited to really start to dig in to this program. I have given myself some time to reflect and reread the pages of notes I had taken to try to make sense of it all. I feel like I would be able to write pages discussing all the sessions I watched and ideas presented, this was truly an enriching experience. Where do I start was a big thought I had as I worked on this first blog post.

Well let’s start with one collaborate session I was available to be live for was with Trish Dyck discussing the Key Success Factors for Virtual Teams. This session seemed very practical for me, as we are embarking on working in virtual teams for the next two years. The practical resources that was shared for our teams to use is something that I think will be used plenty in the next two years http://teamswork.royalroads.ca/ . I also enjoyed the practice what you preach model that was used, when a few of us were able to turn on our cameras and see each other, whether we were the one speaking or not. This really connected what Dyck was talking about on how important it is to build that community virtually.

The topic of virtual community is something that has been on my mind lately and something I struggle with in my own practice. Currently I am a secondary DL teacher, but I do not do any virtual face to face with my students. We do have a physical community space for our students, but not all our able to take advantage of that. I am torn with how I can create more of a community in my own online classroom that works within the restrictions of a asynchronous model.

This leads me in to the next topic which is about openness and open education.This topic had me perplexed on what open education actually meant. Hearing that Open education could vary from being an Open education practice ( OEP), Open education resources (OER) or Free- open admission (Cronin, 2017). Furthermore, the discussion around the teacher being open and in which way is something that I am constantly thinking about, as I am sure every educator does at time. The break down of openness and sharing that Cronin (2017) gave using macro, mesa, micro and nano was exactly what I needed. I struggle daily with how much of myself I should bring in to school and how much I should as of my students. I hope that I can come to a conclusion for my own practice that will work for me and my students, I guess time will tell. 

After watching and reflecting on all of these, I think one of my largest take aways is what Dr Elizabeth Childs (2018) said in the last session, and that is “to be intentional”. As life is busy, and adding a masters degree is not making it less so, it is easy to look at some tasks as hoops to jump. I am going to challenge myself to remember those words as I work through this program.

References

Childs, E., Veletsianos, G. (2018, April) Threading the Themes Together Presented in the Virtual Symposium of the 2017 MALAT Program at Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada.

Cronin, C. (2017, April). Open culture, open education, open questions Presented in the Virtual Symposium of the 2017 MALAT Program at Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada.

Dyck, T. (2018, April).  Key Success Factors for virtual Teams Presented in the Virtual Symposium of the 2018 MALAT Program at Royal Roads University Victoria, BC, Canada.