Long and winding road…

What a rollercoaster that was, I was sure those last two weeks would drag at a snails pace but it has just whizzed by.  Thinking back to my utter horror at the thought of group work I can confidently say this has been an extremely worthwhile and motivating exercise and one that has changed my opinion.

It has been a rewarding process and I’m sure the rest of my peers about to embark on student led seminars who are thinking, like me, that group work is torture, be assured you’ll learn a lot about yourself.

I suffer from serious bouts of multi-tasking but never achieving anything and it was useful to read about motivational theories of late.

Considering the  many theories that Simpson (2012) discusses I think at the outset of signing up for this course I could describe myself as motivated by external (my main reason being to gain a qualification) with a soupcon of introjected (is working full-time enough)?

I’ve felt a slight change in my application this semester thus far. I’m definitely tipping the scale towards being motivated by curiosity and a feeling of investment within the course and what myself and my fellow peers are discussing. I also considered how I view intelligence and was heartened  that, after responding to the two self-theory questions in the Simpson (2012) article that I believe intelligence to be malleable, an”incremental theorist” I believe I can improve and develop with effort.

Our group theme was digital literacy. We had a lot of discussion around the use of social media tools for engagement with students and how the lines between professional and personal identities become blurred.   Hernandez-Serrano (2011) describes  it as “Considering new communication channels and new sociability modes are expanding the dimensions for understanding the participatory process in virtual environments, and by extension, the virtual learning environments.”

I felt it was useful to incorporate the use of social media in our unit and so we created the  hash tag #digiliterati to contain our tweets. This gave our peers another platform outwith the control of the institution to engage and also offer other practitioners external to the unit to participate.

This is a good example of what Hernandez-Serrano discusses that the learning environment is wherever the cohort are. I’ve certainly profited from using social media tools within my own professional development, to learn from a socially and culturally diverse set of online peers with common areas of interest.

Hernandez-Serrano, Marıa Jose, 2011. Progressing the Social Dimension Toward the Collaborative Construction of Knowledge in 2.0 Learning Environments: A Pedagogical Approach In: White, B, King, I and Tsang, P (2011) Social Media Tools and Platforms in Learning Environments, AR: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp.289-311.

Chapter 6: Learning motivation for distance education student support In: Simpson, O (2012) Supporting Students for Success in Online and Distance Learning – Oxon: Routledge, pp.76-91.