Week 8 Relfections

The final week of the course has ended. If you haven't had the experience of online interaction, you might not believe it when I say I will miss the other students in the course. I do look forward to logging in to the discussion board to see what others thought about the readings, projects created, feedback on my thoughts and projects. The varied backgrounds of the other students provides multiple viewpoints.

This week we finalized our final projects and read a couple of articles on using discussion boards. One article titled, Benefits of An Online Discussion List in A Traditional Distance Education Course, by Bradshaw and Hinton (2004) made a couple of points that interested me. One is the idea of exposure versus transformation in learning situations. A second is "if the course content is meaningful within the student's particular social context and their cultural and value system, learning is more likely to occur."

Many years ago I taught grammar and punctuation to middle school students and adult learners. Students are exposed to grammar and punctuation starting in first grade, though for many the concepts never seem to click and stick - no transformation occurs. In my mind, the secret lays somewhere in the second concept listed above. There lacks meaning in their social context, culture, and/or value system. The issue is not exclusive to English. When I figure out how to redesign learning systems to address this, I'm sure you'll hear about it.

My classmates have developed interesting projects for this course. I hope they continue to update their blogs as they implement them. I would like to see their results.