Day 4

A short day to consolidate so much new learning.
The blackboard focus, although interesting, was irrelevant to those of us who have no input into the assessment side of our course. A pity that this wasn't identified before we strongly encouraged our staff to sacrifice a week of their break to participate in the course.
Nevertheless, the afternoon program held much promise: developing multimedia resources, including pod-vodcasts, wordle, delicious, animoto, photostory, xtranormal etc.
I was keen to practice with these new media. Instead, we found ourselves giving the tutor feedback for 2 hours, and then being given a quick drive through - these products exist - and then left to explore on our own. It all seems a bit inconsistent with the literature on how we learn computer skills. The doing is key, to be able to navigate these new concepts.
I would so have enjoyed being given mock projects, which required use of these new media.
Somehow, I suspect our tutor would have enjoyed this too.

I wonder if the lack of adequate planning, with a generic course being produced for a group which could hardly be described as generic, left it a little out of touch with the needs of the group. With such a vast array of information available now-a-days, accurate, concise information is essential in the planning stages, if appropriate learning is to be achieved. Hopefully this will be incorporated when the course is next run.