Week 6 Prompts and Answers, part 2

“Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional.”


In part 1 I offered upon some of my macro-level reflections; on a more applied level I also learned that…

• …There are myriad tools for all manner of situations, and most of them are under constant revision either by their users or in response to their users suggestions and requests. If it occurs to me that, “I wish there was a way to…”, I will search for a tool because there is a decent chance someone is trying to solve the problem already.
• …Asynchronous guided discussion such as that used on the class discussion boards might take a bit of getting used to, but it can be a very interesting way to elicit the sharing and discussion of ideas. The two most obvious advantages are time-shifting and the irrelevance of location. The principle drawbacks as I experienced them are that it can be difficult to maintain a lively exchange when it is asynchronously stretched over a long period of time, the absence of body-language cues can make it challenging to “hear” the tone of a comment, and it can be difficult to interpret lack of follow-up commentary (i.e. Was this comment irrelevant? Obvious? Uninteresting? Generally regarded as moronic? Or so profound that no one else has anything to add?)
• …Setting up a blog or a virtual group or a wiki or a Twitterfeed or a Facebook page or etcetera… is easy. Populating it with interesting/meaningful content is less so. Throwing the creative access portal open to participants is the new model—ten thousand people contributing to a common purpose means that some portion of it will be really good and will rise to the top.
• ...As with so many creative endeavors, it is real experience and effort that distinguishes the “best” exemplars from the dreck and dross. This brave new networked world may allow anyone to become a publisher, but talent and professionalism still shine. So if you genuinely feel inspired to do something then do not be deterred by all the others in the same arena—quality will show.
• ...Using the power of creative networking promises/threatens to be transformative on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. To loosely paraphrase a blogger I follow, five-billion of us are in the process of joining in with what heretofore five-hundred-million of us have been doing. This is exciting in terms of creativity, but terrifying in terms of demand upon finite resources.

Okay, I guess the “how will I use this stuff” will be in part 3.