Shaking up ideas

A further thought on last nights Elluminate discussion is that, and I think someone commented on this, that they felt that the process of having interacted had been more valuable than the discussions on the Sfard and Bayne articles. In a way I think this is true, and probably reflected in my initial reflection a few minutes afterwards. However, whilst in session I felt that I had developed my thinking on the articles. I’m not sure it was deep learning, but the expereince seemed to tease out and shake up ideas from people. We didn’t explore any of these themes in depth, but they emerged nonetheless. I’ll be interested to see whether in future sessions, we continue to just ’shake up’ emerging themes, or whether we learn to use the time for more in depth discussions.

Reflection on Elluminate session 25/02/09

I’ve just come out of a very positive Elluminate experience. It was my first real exepreicne of wokring online in this way, I had used Lyceum very briefly on H807, but not in the same structured and purposive way as this. Most f us started to use the chat box once we had got under way, and atthe outset, I did find the silences a little awkward. However, once we got warmed up I thought there was a lot of value in being able to speak to each other online. It was really beneficial to hear the views of other peeople on the Sfard article, for example. We all seemed to struggle a little with this conceptually, but there were some intersting points made about it. The experience has taught me that capturing these comments is the tricky part. Although I have tried to keep some rough notes whilst participating in the session, the level of concentration required made this quite difficult. Looking at my notes after the evnt, and I see that they don’t actually make that much sense. Funnily enough, they look like field notes – except I would normally have a recording to go with those! I’m sure that this is just a case of needing some practice though. I’ll look forward to the next time Elluminate is used.