Lessons learnt - continuation and my feedback

I have written one blog on five lessons which I could learn from the ONL171 course. As an engineer, it is not easy for me to understand a long text, listen to many discussions which don't have particular goal and work with the people which have completely different goals than I have. I struggled in this course from sometimes very strong dynamic changes. I have also noticed when I took pedagogic courses that participants start to by impressed too fast from the ocean of available technological options and teaching methods. At the end almost everybody writes that "Now all my students will be learning active, we will implement blending learning in all courses..." I always try to stay tolerant and say also that I am impressed and will change myself. But it is not so easy to change your habbits in 5 minutes. In March 2017, I was so impressed from learning about digital tools, and now I feel so tired from it, and really start to miss traditional classroom. The information which we got in this course is useful, but maybe it was too much of innovative learning and too many discussions on how to bring our collaborative learning in the right direction. Maybe I just don't realize the potential of the information which we got so that it could be too early to evaluate if I went through the surface or deep learning in ONL171...

 

We had some fun, but also frustrations about how to collaborate. At that moment I have again a problem with my reseach collaborators. We have many co-authors and only one is who is doing the entire work. After almost 12 month working together, where we had dropouts, conflicts, new participants and financial problems, I am so demotivated to do any research. If you have only one who must initiate, motivate, organize and do at the end the entire work, I personally feel demotivated to do any research. The tendency of our PBL5 group work was very different. I cannot say that I am demotivated to teach, and actually I think that the advantages of blended learning that combines traditional classroom and digital tool are large. The frustration about some participants which from the beginning were not very interested in the course and more or less wasted our meeting time reminds me the situations with my research, but in general I hope to stay in contact with the active participants from our group and maybe even work on a more serious projects together. We should see what other participants say in our common presentation for the Topic 5. I still keep a writing of an article in mind :=)

 

One thing more about the common work in PBL5 is that you don't really feel the differences in our nationalities. Collaborative learning makes participants act as only one nationality. I find almost distruptive to talk about south and north mentality as the influence of our personality is significanly more than our nationality features. We have in the laboratory two students from Spain. One is superclean and another one is very dirty. We always have problems in the lab because they are good friends, but their collaborative work is not very successful. One is contaminating the lab, and another one is very frustrated to clean the lab. What are the features of Spanish person when you look at these two completely opposite behaving students? Are all Spanish people so dirty or so clean? Some misunderstanding which we had during the course come from our understanding of English language. We say some words in English and understand the meaning of these words completely different. Well, the solution for that problem can be to have meetings in Swedish, but then such participants as Susan van Harmelen from South Africa will be excluded. I also don't think that it is a good idea to group students according to their language groups because then I would personally lose all my interest to make changes in something if I work only in the scandinavian language group. Such active participants as Susan from South Africa inspire me to continue. Sometimes you just cannot find solutions for the problems. Maybe we should rather continue with small misunderstandings than separate students in groups according to their language belongings. If you look at my scale-bar on what I reached in this course and what is still on the long way to be improved, I think it was not a bad idea to participate in ONL171.

Figure 1: My progress bar in ONL171

 

In this progress bar, I evaluate the improvement of my digital tool skill, feeling a part of the global world, organization and initialization of the learning process and paying respect to other opinions as the highest output from the course. I am quite close to understand what collaboration means to avoid future problems I have to trust new collaborators and always test and try. I am also glad that I lost my preconceptions as I think it is not the differences in our nationalities which made problems in the group work, but the differences in our personalities are more influencing. With the inactive participants I always had a large problem, and I will continue to live with it. If I notice that somebody is abolutely demotivated to do the work from the beginning I will also pay less attention to that person.

As we can see the thermometer of the bee became red which means that ONL171 brought a lot of new realizations in my future career :=)