Getting Organised for H807

I am very excited to be coming back to the subject of elearning technology. My very first MAODE module was on this very topic, back in the pre web 2.0 days of 2002!! It is going to be fascinating to get underneath the surface of all of the changes that have taken place since then, and to work out which technologies can play a bigger part in my company's embryonic distance learning offering.

Before getting stuck into the content of H807, I have decided to take time to reflect on some of my H808 experiences.

My overwhelming memory of H808 was of confusion. I found it hard to make connections between the various topics we covered, in particular what the eportfolio was, and how it connected with the various etivities in which we took part. The fact that my eportfolio (the H808 Examinable Component) gained me the lowest mark of any of my 14 academic submissions so far tells me something about the extent to which I did eventually work that out!

With this in mind, I have decided to spend time during the week before the module starts by studying the course structure and the assignments, and by re-reading the TMAs from H802. This will make it much easier to be making connections with H807 material right from the start. I am confident I will find the connections on H807 easier to make, given my H802 experience and the fact that I do use web 2.0 applications of various kinds already (Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Linkedin, Elluminate, Google Apps etc). Let's hope I haven't been picking up too many bad habits on my own!!

Another frustration, I now realise, was that I allowed the timing of the TMA's and the EC to dictate how I organised my thoughts. I suspect that this made the execution of these assignments more laboured than they needed to be. My mind works in quite a butterfly way, and this time around, I want to do a better job at picking up these disorderly thoughts as I go. I have created an electronic notebook which has separate sections for each of the assignments, and I plan to collect nuggets of information there, as they occur to me. There is no rule that says that you can't start collecting your thoughts for future TMA's before you have finished the current one, is there?

One last note to myself; isn't it time I reviewed the experience of the changes that I made on the second Distance Learning Programme as a result of my H808 experiences? I really must do that before I become engrossed in H807 thinking; I am planning to use this same DL Programme for my H807 Examinable Component, so summarising the progress I have made will be a great discipline for me.