Open_Ed Course Fall 2007

I have very much liked the assignments for this week because I needed to have an idea of what was going on among my classmates after 9 weeks of intensive reading but very little communication inside the community.  Of the 53 people who enrolled to the Open Ed Course, about half are more or less actively involved participants at the moment as far as I am concerned.

I have spent the whole week in trying to read and comment on all the posts for week 9. From this point of view, I agree with David Wiley that this task is almost impossible to carry out every week.  However, I think I have learnt a lot from these posts, particularly from the meta-cognitive point of view. First of all, I decided to write a comment directly on every post for week 9 instead of providing an overall report of our thoughts in my blog for two reasons. First, as the experience of this course has shown, I think that the practice of writing highlights in one’s post can create discrimination between the blogs included in the survey and the ones left out. Writing a report where all bloggers’ contributions were included would be impossible for me, so better not to include anyone than discriminate among us, it would not be nice for those who were excluded. Second, posting comments directly on people’s blogs gives more opportunity for the comment to be read at least by the author of the post that has been commented on. I do not think that this post here in my blog will be read by more than one or two of my classmates, I can also understand why, it would be just the same for me, I see it‘s a hard work (there is little time and there are some linguistic and cultural barriers to consider), but it is the reality (the dark side, maybe) of this international course and anyway I do not mind because I am learning a lot from this experience as well.

These are the people whose posts for week 9 I have read and commented on:

Alessandro Giorni 
Andreas Formiconi  
Antonio Fini 
Bobbe Allen 
Bryan Ollendyke 
Catia Harriman 
Chenyong Zhu 
Emanuela Zibordi
Erik Levanger 
Greg Francom 
Karen Fasimpaur 
Megan Haggerty 
Rob Barton 
Stian Haklev 
Yu Chun Kuo 

They have read different books from different perspectives. Some just tend to make summaries of the main points of a book, others also offer their own personal interpretation. I don’t want this to sound as a critic to the others’ works, because it is obvious that contributing with original ideas and thoughts is difficult for beginners in the open education field as some of us are, myself included. Motivation, the importance of a learner-centred approach, sustainability, the improvement of webtools, cooperative peer authoring are the most important key ideas that have most attracted my attention in my classmates’ posts. A general consideration I would like to give is that, as more and more happens since the advent of the Internet with the "copy and paste" practice made easier and easier, originality in thoughts and personal responses is difficult to find, so getting a discussion started is a challenge particularly with shortage of time. And when you stop and read what the others think it is just difficult to respond to everybody, the impression you get is that there are some authors who do not read, or false authors who do copy …