Making Some Headway

I am very excited to pull up my sleeves and start work on my EdWeb proposal. I hope that the ideas kicking around my brain are in line with the expectation of this class. My objective is to try and blend an eLearning educational experience with many entertaining elements for my young audience. My concern is that the entertainment component might be a bit of a departure from what other students in this class are doing. Oh well, we won't know until we get started...

Ah, epiphanies. It was great to get a tentative delegation of roles/responsibilities for our webinar project. It will probably change several times, but I feel more grounded having a framework for how we will get this thing done. There are so many technical problems that can arise, I just fear the whole class experiencing digital freeze when we are ready to get started.

Now, one observation I have to make is that up until now, I somewhat viewed Horton's book as a bit overdone. I never seemed to get that "a-ha!" feeling. Each chapter seemed to be about twice as long as necessary, and a lot of the material seemed obvious. But after watching Downes presenation, OMG! I will take a chapter in Horton's book any day! Perhaps it's because I am not a professional educator, but I feel like so much of what Downes is addressing is so far over my head. I get it, and it pretty much makes sense, but probably not as well as some of the other students in the class who are educators.

Our group work is going well. It's interesting to see how our different styles come together. It is a challenge producing our webinar so that it is impactful and an active experience for the attendees. The webinar I attended fell short of interactivity by a long margin, but it wasn't promoted as something participants could fully engage with. I can see how it's easy to fall into the trap of designing traditional "forced" instruction (thank you Downes) and just simply spew out the educational content, with no expectation of activity from your audience but absorption. It seems like the easy way out. But when you consider all of the advantages that this 2.0 technology offers us, it is wasted when we don't fully utilize it to its capabilities. Plus the educational experience is enhanced by all when there is a large degree of interactivity among all participants, of every age.