Wednesday, June 10, 2009

What to do?

I'm up to the "What's your idea?" bit on http://wikieducator.org/Flexible_learning and its asking

  1. What is your idea for flexible learning?
  2. What examples of Flexible Learning does your idea draw on?
  3. How does your flexible learning plan fit with an educational organisation's strategic directions?
  4. What are the considerations, risks, concerns that you will need to resolve before you can implement your plan for flexible learning

To be frank I'm stuck, as I'm not actually teaching a particular subject. I'm a learner at heart and I'm passionate about elearning. I do work in the vocational education field but not actively as a trainer, at the moment. I do have a micro business (just started out this year) creating and customising learning objects and material for other people.

I'm wondering if the reason why I'm in a mental block on this is because I'm uncomfortable coming up with an actual course. As a learner what I want is more a learning map to get me to a particular goal within an agreed time - much like this wikieducator course has done. As a learner I want something that saves me searching time, highlighting the best and free learning resources out there, gives me hints on how to construct my own learning and gives me a way to test my progress against a widely acknowledged benchmark. In part I've tried to do this through my existing wikispace in regard to ways of learning languages, without the testing/self-assessment part because I don't have a good enough knowledge myself of the (for example) European levels commonly used internationally for such bench marking.

If I was to do something similar on say "worm farming", "edible landscape gardening" or "small-scale rainforest rehabilitation" (two things I do in my "spare" time http://dzyanna.googlepages.com/anadventureinediblewoodlandgardeninginta) would I do it in wikispaces or wikibooks or wiki-educator? - I'm really not sure.

Adult numeracy also interests me. Most people reach a point in their maths ability where they can't progress. what's needed when that happens is someway of self-assessing what underpinning knowledge needs strengthening so that progress can take place. Its also hard to get a visual interconnective map of how the different types of math: geometry, algebra and so on fit together to enable future learning and vocational application within industry - ie where can I use this stuff? what's it good for? But that is probably something of huge scope and not something that I have enough underpinning skills to take on.

I'm more used to helping others with their stuff than doing this myself

3 comments:

  1. Having similar problems myself - fancy a chat about it either on Skype or Elluminate tomorrow?

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  2. Dzyanna
    I think you have already answered your question about what to focus on in the last sentence you wrote: "I'm more used to helping others with their stuff than doing this myself".

    Have you thought about providing a space for the people you help? Perhaps a wiki where they can collect and share and creat information relevant to their work, and or some sort of professional discussion space? Some initial ideas to help focus your thoughts.

    All your other suggestions all have value as well, but the best way is to design something which you will have direct use for on a daily basis. What do you think?

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  3. Thanks for the offer Sarah - I know it turned out you had something else on. Bronwyn: I'll give your ideas some thought on your ideas . Thanks also to William who contacted me on the forum and offered encouragement on the numeracy option. I did find a good article today on learner focused numeracy teaching http://www.nald.ca/library/learning/mathman/mathman.pdf but the more I looked into the maths stuff out there the vaster I realised the topic was. I might be better sticking to something where I have more expertise.

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