Summary of Block 2 (Part 1)

Well here goes for Block 2. Thanks to John and Les for your comments and agreement about Block 1! Reviewing and summarising is biting into my Week 21/22 study time, but it's a double week so a little bit more flexibility. The course is very intense and there is such a lot in each week's worth of activities, that I have come up against a "No more!" moment, until I get this lot off my chest.

We started in Block 2 with Weeks 8/9, our first double week with activities linked together as an integrated whole over two weeks. I found these two weeks very tough, but at the end very rewarding as I could apply it to my professional understandings. We were firstly introduced to the ideas of learning activities and learning design. Learning design is the means of guiding the creation of learning activities, and representing them so that they can be shared between the different role players involved. This scaffolds the process and provides a way of promoting and sharing good practice. These ideas are immediately relevant to me in my practice of process-based quality management and the project that we did at the University of Pretoria for example, where we scaffolded the instructional design process by implementing an online quality management system, which enabled the instructional designers to review, evaluate and share the best way to carry out the steps of the design process in their local context.

I plan to use my blog to say more about pro-active improvement based approaches to quality management (now being referred to as quality enhancement in the UK); in contrast to the checking and inspecting approaches which have been used under the name of quality assurance in education for some time. For now off the soap box and back on the summary.

Weeks 8/9 showed us lots of different design tools and we got a chance to experiment with some of them. We used Compendium LD for example, and took a look at Cloudworks, a new social networking site developed by the OU for sharing learning design ideas. For me, there were too many tools to try out, I would have preferred to concentrate on one or two, especially since our forums were very quiet after the TMA. I would have preferred to be led through these vital two weeks with lots of examples and assistance, and did feel rather isolated at this time.

In Week 10 things really started to come back together again. We looked at lots of different sources for learning which are 'out there' now, beyond the confines of formal education. We considered the ins and outs of Wikipedia and Citizendium, opened up a Delicious account and did an exercise on searching for journals in the OU library. Finally we were encouraged to start blogging, which is when I experimented and set up this blog. I wish I had done it before!!!

The final activity in Week 10 was to look at re-purposing OERs on the OU OpenLearn website. I have to admit I never got as far as this one, despite how interested I am in the topic, and it's still on my to-do list to go back to.

Now I am in Block 3, I can see that we were starting to establish elements of our own personal toolkit - or PLE (Personal Learning Environment). I particularly enjoyed starting to blog, and making this blogger interface rather than using the rather pedestrian OU provided one. We return this personal / institutionally provided debate in Block 3.