Brandy Usick's Site

During the course I opened up a Word document and began to jot down ideas about the midterm assignment. As I went along I added my thoughts as well as expectations about the assignment that I gleaned from the Thursday night discussions. I would come back to this document and attempt to flesh out my random jottings into complete sentences and paragraphs.

As a result of one of those Thursday discussions I realized that I had made a mistake in selecting a tool from the We Are Media site. I originally opted for Disqus, not because I had thought it would be particularly applicable in my work but because it would push my limits of what I know and am comfortable with. Silly me. I quickly realized that this would happen regardless of the tool I selected. More importantly I wanted to make progress on several work projects to which I wish to apply some of these technologies.

In fact Miriam and I often collaborate on various educational projects (e.g. virtual learning commons, workshops for graduate students, etc) and we decided that we would each buy an office license for Articulate, a collection of elearning software tools

Here’s an excerpt from our project planning document:

The outcome of the project is to create online resources that take advantage of a number of learning technologies. This interactive content can be added to the Virtual Learning Commons (VLC) and to our respective office websites, Student Advocacy and Learning Assistance Centre.

Learning outcomes:
(1) To help students who might not otherwise contact our offices identify the most appropriate academic strategy, policy or procedure that is pertinent to their issue (e.g. thesis development, proper citation, academic integrity, appropriate behaviour, safety on campus).
 (2) For students who attend our office or who participate in our workshops, provide ongoing access to online and interactive materials that will help them to identify strategies that may assist them to be successful in their role as university student (e.g. appropriate referencing, managing conflict, time management, safeguarding self and academic work).

Although Articulate was not identified as one of the tools in the We Are Media I decided that I would benefit greatly by taking this opportunity afforded by participation in this course and completion of this mid term assignment to explore this tool. I also suspected that along the way I would learn how to use a few other tools and consider ways to apply them to my own work and personal context. And unsurprisingly, that is exactly what happened and what continues to happen.

The two things that I kept – and continue to keep - in mind while working on this assignment were:
•    to make transparent my learning process and to share what I have learned,
•    to consider that the process may be more important than the end product in the context of this course and assignment.

Unfortunately, I still found myself bogged down by creating an end “product” (i.e. something “Flash”y created with my tool of choice).