Thing 23 - You Made It

For my last blog, I've chosen to do a 3-2-1 reflective format on my experience with this course:

3 Thing I've Learned / Gained through this course ....

• Vocabulary / terminology related to the Read/Write web: Through the course I have become much more comfortable with and fluent in the vocabulary related to Web 2.0. As Marzano would point out, vocabulary is foundational to the building of content knowledge. While I am still a technology immigrant, the language around these "things" is no long such a mystery to me.
• Skills related to Web 2.0 technologies: While I am still not an expert, I do feel that I have a rudimentary knowledge of "things" like blogs, social networking, wiki, productivity tools, and social bookmarking. As I continue to use these technologies, I am confident that my proficiency and comfort level with them will increase.
• Understanding of the vision that exists for education in a technology-rich culture: As was pointed out in the Learning to Change/ Changing to Learn video, technology in education is no longer a choice - it is a fact of life. The 21st century has brought with it a new set of literacies focused on the following question(s): "Do students know how to find information, validate it, synthesize it, leverage it, communicate it, collaborate with it, and problem solve with it." It can be a very exciting time in education if we can get past issues around funding, mandated testing, and traditional delivery systems.

2 Questions I still have regarding this course....

• How do you build community in an online learning course? While I have learned a lot in this course, I feel that I have learned most of it on my own with help (at strategic points) from the instructor facilitator. Even though the assignments periodically called for us to post comments to each other's blog this rarely happened. There are 21 participants in the class and we were asked at least three times to post to each others' blogs, so there should be at least 66 comments out there....but there are not! And, a majority of the comments that are there are from the instructor. I hope to facilitate an online course in the future and am still struggling with how to make it a true professional learning network.
• Will the 23 Things site be available to me after the course is finished? I know I will need to go back and review some of the things that I have learned, watch some of the videos again, and reference the resources. Will I be able to do that or will access to this site be closed at the end of the course?

1 action I will take as a result of this course....

• I look forward to leading an online book study of the book The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the Worlds' Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom" by James W. Stigler & James Hiebert for a grant project that I am involved in. Right now I am thinking that the best format would be a wiki.