Learning blog / reflection module 3
Towards the end of the topic, finalize and share your reflections in your blog and have a look around how others have captured their stories. Suggested themes for reflection in your learning blog:
- An occasion when real collaborative learning took place, that moved your own thinking forward
I have used different sets of collaborative education within my field, i.e. with nursing-students i do collaborative work with drug calculations, peer-learning bachelor thesis supervision, and with police-students i do acute medical theoretical and practical collaborative work. The project I have been working most on regarded collaborative learning are peer-learning in bachelors thesis for nursing-students. Before i started the project, I experienced spending a lot of time tutoring my students, repeating information, and that learning was very linear with very little interaction and missing collaborative learning. A colleague of mine experienced same difficulties and we decided to start tutoring students together in peers. We have been doing the collaborative peer-learning now for 2 years and educated about 40 nursing-students with this method. Each peer-supervision are given with a total of 8-10 students per session, with a total of 5 sessions. Each session focus on areas which are experienced as difficult, hard to understand, pitfalls, but also include an open-reflection for all peer-students to discuss about what they are thinking, why, and further future planing and thoughts. Me and my colleague experience the collaborative peer-learning to improve efficiency, autonomy, collaborative skills of the students. Students interact with each other more, supporting, advising, contributing with each others work in progress. We develop the method each year, bit by bit, adding areas for peer-learning which are commonly experienced as difficult parts and trying to increase the collaborative learning.
- Your own Personal Learning Networks – how have they developed and how they could be taken further
I do not have a lot of experience regarded Personal Learning Networks (PLN). I use Research gate, a network gathering scientific work among researchers. At research gate i can select what researcher i want to follow, staying up-to-date within the field of research of my own choice. The missing part of research gate might be the lack of interactions, discussion and reflections between researchers.
- Reflect on how you can use technologies to enable your own networks for learning processes
Every time I see an opportunity to make my work or education more effective and facilitated, it is mostly based on the improvement of digital literacy and use of the “right” set of technologies. With that said, it is not always easy finding the “right set of technologies” which are suited for your means. One aspects tend to learn more regarded digital literacy is the use of macros when working in different documents or programs. One example, when giving a comment in Word you can easily push – Ctrl+Alt+M, or when citing in Mendeley (Reference-program) you can push – Alt+M to add an reference. These are just some of easy and fast key-combinations to make my work more efficient.
PS. Questions asked in this section did not produce any references as they did in the discussion of module 3, e.g. what are your experiences vs what are the strong/weak…
Thank you for reading my posts, I look forward seeing you work!
/Michael