Work closely with peers to strengthen my online collaborating skills and gain additional perspectives to refine my learning philosophy by understanding how my teaching behaviors relate to other professional teaching strategies, principles and theories.
Reflection
I developed this goal for two main reasons: my lack of desire to collaborate and my limited philosophical vision. This goal was difficult for me to accept and incorporate. I have always liked being an independent learner and consequently, my learning ideas have been somewhat sheltered. Beginning the ITEC program, I was frustrated with the discussion boards and all the required “participation” points. Early on, I knew I needed to change my attitude and find ways to learn from others. In the back of my mind, I continued to remind myself of all the benefits I could gain from collaboration.
My first few experiences with collaboration helped me realize the important role that it would have in my program study. In ITEC 5320 Visual Literacy, with Dr. Dousay, the discussions came to life. Opinions and strategies were relevant and inspiring as we discussed message design from a variety of images. Maybe it was easy because I was interested in the topics, but it was fun to express my thoughts and feelings. I began to see myself putting my philosophical ideas and beliefs into statements. Constructive feedback and critiques from peers on assignments helped me see their perspectives and learn to formulate my own opinions based on principles and theories of visual learning (see peer critiques attachment). Additionally, in the class I designed my personal logo that reflects my personal beliefs and foundation of my teaching philosophy (see personal logo attachment). While I had not yet formed my philosophy, this was a spring board to elevate my vision of the type of teacher and learner I wanted to be.
Over the course of the next few semesters I grew to enjoy discussion boards and group work. Collaborating and debating best practices really initiated the flow of learning for me. I feel like I gained more from the smaller group discussion because everyone seemed to open up more. It was nice to compare ideas and preferences with other scholarly strategies. I joined the UWYO ITEC Grad Student Facebook page and followed #Edchat discussions on Twitter to continue to expand my philosophy and stay better connected to the evolving instructional technology world.
Two projects that really stretched me to work with others were an instructional design project and case study (see ID and CS attachments). In ITEC 5560 Design/Development of Instructional Systems, a group of six of us designed a systematic training approach to use Google Apps for Education (GAFE). This was a difficult project. It was a little disorganized and unclear until we found a way to work together. I think most of the difficulties came from trying to adjust schedules and make time to work together on specific sections, specific deadlines and trying to accomplish this in an online community seemed near impossible with six different people. We also tried to use too many sites to collaborate (Asana, Google hangouts, wyocourses, Google docs).
In ITEC 5020 Distance Education, our case study project went much better. Although it was more work than I anticipated, the five of us all worked well with each other. I found myself leading out more than I usually do and I created one Google doc with the case study and all the questions we needed to answer, where we could comment and examine the details of the case at our own availability. It was interesting to see all everyone’s learning philosophies expressed in their marked ups and notes in the document (see collaboration attachment). This simple, focused approach of collaboration made the proposal recommendation much smoother. Knowing that group work can be painful and difficult, this last project helped restore my faith in the process of learning from other student’s strengths and weakness.
Overall, these experiences have helped me develop and refine my learning philosophy. Self-discovery, variety, doing and visualizing, all stem from ideas that I have learned from others throughout the program. I still think I have work to do to perfect my goal, however, I feel that I have greatly strengthened my collaborating skills and elevated my vision to better understand teaching strategies, principles and theories.