Week 3 – online participation

I couldn’t follow the live webinar, so I answer some of the questions I found interesting when reading the slides. So first, what irritates me in digital technology? I think it’s not digital technology in itself that irritates me but rather its quite uncritical celebration in education.

Quite often, it is taken for granted that we need to use IT wherever and whenever to transform interaction but interaction can actually follow quite similar patterns with or without technology, as my own research also shows. I think IT tools provide certain good opportunities but we shouldn’t rely on them too much or blindly. I quite often use ‘offline’ discussions and crafting (gluing, cutting, drawing, etc.) in my university teaching because I found embodied multi-sensory learning can be enhanced by such methods as well.

Answering questions about my personal history, I have been using computers since 1993 (then I was 11) and got my first online experience at around 1994. I immediately wanted to watch online videos which was quite challenging since the connection was pretty slow. Then the internet looked quite different, and I needed to be quite conscious about what and how to search as search engines were quite primitive – compared to the current situation. From the very beginning, being online has meant being multilingual as well. Already in the 90s, I used quite a lot of English and then French as my skills had developed. Today I mainly use English, Finnish and Hungarian in my online life – Hungarian being my native language but not my main working language.

I started using my first mobile phone in 2000; I very seldom used it as it was so expensive to call and text. But anyway, it has proved to be useful. I have been using Google services since 2005. I started using social media platforms at around the same time. Then there was a pretty popular Hungarian portal called iWiW – now it doesn’t exist any more. I joined Facebook at around 2006 but last year abandoned it due to my emerging social media addiction. I have experienced many positive effects of not being on FB and not using other main social media platforms either. For this reason, I am quite critical about the ever increasing pressure on academics to be on social media and post and share all the time. It’s like pressing alcoholics to drink more alcohol as part of their regular job. I think that through my teaching, research and other outreach activities I can still gain visibility and make an impact.

Week 2 – Connecting

This week ONL191 has gone OK. Nothing extraordinary, nothing revolutionary, but practicalities get organized and first tasks are done. This week has been quite hectic, surprise meetings, surprise tasks, super tight deadlines – and I’ve been travelling whole week so I’m not yet overjoyed. But hopefully the team goes to a good direction 🙂

Otherwise I think I’ve been active and helped the group in reaching its goals. It’s interesting to see how heterogeneous this group is; we actually picked the topic of diversity as the organizing idea of our PBL13 presentation as well. Let’s see how the journey continues!

Joining ONL191

I’m glad to join you guys 🙂 Below I tell you why I’m here.

Recently, I’ve been using more and more digital tools in my teaching at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and I also encourage my students to prepare their assignments in multimodal ways – for example, as videos, digital stories, comic strips, etc.

I have used Moodle as online platform and I’ve been quite satisfied with that even though of course it also has limitations. I’ve been responsible for organizing a blended in-service teacher training course Everyday Creativity as part of an Erasmus+ funded project, and perhaps many of my regular university courses can be considered blended as we have only a minimal amount of contact teaching at my university.

I think I’ve learnt a lot from practice but I wish to deepen my knowledge as well as to gain new insights and a more systematic knowledge of networked learning. I’m sure that I’ll learn a lot from conversation with you guys and will get inspired 🙂