WEEK TWO : Learning is not always an easy game ...

Dear fellow bloggers,

So happy to be back among you again.

Learning has always been a painful joy helping us move forward. What I mean by the oxymoron part of this statement is that as learners we usually experience certain difficulties and challenges during the process of the act of learning . Pleasure and and sometimes even euphoria begin once the end product is successful. That is, when we feel and notice that positive behavioral change in us, we just forget about pain. It becomes history. Nevertheless, I ‘m very happy about this online learning experience as it is allowing us to put ourselves in our students’shoes and eventually make us reconsider some of our teaching practices. And more importantly perhaps, adapt our teaching to our students’ different styles. After all, teaching is at the service of learning, isn’t it ?

Just like my fellow coursemates, I did have my share of challenges during the somewhat hectic episode two of the webskills course. But I must say I learnt a lot from both the assignments as well as my web-classmates interesting and inspiring posts on Nicenet and their blogs. The first assingment we had to do was describing a class we teach that would benefit from a technology-inspired change. I took an immense pleasure reading those rich and well-written descriptions. In fact, they gave me an ample idea about the different conditions under which teaching and learning interact in various classrooms /arenas of the globe. I would say the class descriptions relatively reflect the digital divide that exists between the Northern and Southern parts of the world. So, differnces are inevitable, but luckily, we do share something in common. Care about learners and enthusiasm to bring the best to our teaching practices are perhaps what unite us most wherever we are.

Later, I had to edit pages of our wiki. This was totally new to me. I was a bit familiar with just the zooming and unzooming functionalities of Google Earth. Nothing more, nothing less. But thanks to Deborah I managed to localize my home on the World Map and put a blue pin on it. The view is not as clear as it is of some other coursemates’ nice homes, but it’s OK. I had some fun doing the task, anyway.

Writing learning objectives in the ABCD method was another task I had to accomplish this week. Its seeming simplicity turned out to be very misleading. It was very demanding and required maximum of focus and accuracy. As Stephen rightly said in his blogpost, writing learning objectives is similar to a guiding « roadmap » whithout which teachers and learners would likely easily get lost. The suggested reading material for this task was very helpful. And while I was surfing on the net, I came across another method of writing objectives. It looks more detailed than the ABCD one. It is ‘acronymized ‘ the ASSURE model. You can check the link below to know more about it:

http://www2.unca.edu/education/edtech/techcourse/assure.htm

There is a common French proverb that goes like this : ‘Qui cherche, trouve.’, ’Seek and ye shall find’. Well, reading Deborah’s article on web searching tips has made me doubt the validity of the proverb when it comes to finding one’s way with search engines. Not any randomly typed query would get us the best hits we need.There’s more to it than simply that. There are tips and techniques, Deborah kindly shared with us, that one needs to gradually famaliarize himself/herself with to make a query more efficient and the hits more satisfactory. Another equally important thing I learnt from this assignment was about search engines. There are specialized and general-purpose ones and it takes just a little of patience and curiosity to explore the hidden treasures they have. So Google, despite being a powerful search engine, is not necessarily synonymous with web searching. ‘Noodletools’ website will certainly come in handy when Almighty Google fails to meet our searching needs.

Regards

Arbi