First Post in EduBlog (Sept. 2008)

This is my very first post last Fall. It began my professional journey into edublogging. The vision has changed considerably. I am now completing an independent studies course on edublogging theory and practice, and enjoy the flexibility and independence of working autonomously.

This stack of posts have been collected from Me2U at Athabasca University as well as from webskills.ca, a site I have now closed.

This Fall, I am taking the MDE 605 course from Athabasca University and the online connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes from the University of Manitoba.

 To focus my diverse but related development efforts, I have created a personal learning space called webskills.ca, to aggregate and showcase my progress towards a number of personal learning objectives:

1. The site will act as a drafting board for reflections and brainstorming for working through and chewing over ideas prior to officially publishing them to the MDE 605 members’ blog or the connectivism course blog.

2. To meet the MDE605 course requirements, the site will showcase a working model (in-progress) for an online DE start-up venture called web skills, to submit for scrutiny and feedback to potential investors and organizations. 

3. A section of the site will showcase a proof of concept for presentation to my employer (post-secondary institution) demonstrating the use of blogs and wikis for literacy instruction about ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) with adult learners.

4. Demonstrate the use of a collaborative wiki for generating/sharing/brainstorming ideas about the concept of liminality, the process of personal transition and transformation, and its impact on human potential in the emerging digital age of networked lifelong learning.

5. The exploration and sharing of ideas about technologies and strategies that encourage community-building and leaving an enduring legacy for future generations: collaborative journaling, digital story-telling, scrapbooking, path-making (making trails through the web’s resources, leaving it easier for others), meme creation and propagation (selecting five questions to frame an idea, reply to the questions, then post, and send off to others to do the same), and the use of digital story-sacks to encourage reading, and many other related ideas. I am especially interested in their impact on curriculum, and coming up with working examples demonstrating the use of the various instructional strategies.