Adrift!

I am now beginning to experience some of the problems that accompany collaboration in VLE's. It is clear each of the participants has a schedule into which participation needs to fit, but I feel there is no place where I can meet my fellow red group. If John is feeling he is sinking I feel more adrift on the high sea. I have seem to have lost my reference points.

Group Red enters the arena

I am now entering Week two with all my fellow participants in the Online Tutoring course. This is the week when cooperation and collaboration become translated into practice. So collaboration is no longer the dirty word, it tends to have in compulsory type environments! In the world of Online Tutoring it has all the connotations of positive working together - well the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Online Tutoring - Reflections on week one

Goals
The purpose of this week has been to meet some of the online tutoring group - the participant learners - the coverts, the converts and those in between, as well as the moderators.

Then I wanted to know what was entailed in supporting students as an online Tutor. Getting a better understanding how students communicate and learn today. So what better way to know than to be a learner in a VLE. I can see that to be proficient, will mean knowing the tools and the environments, I will need to know which tools work best in which situations. This means a lot of initial time investment e.g. this week alone, I spent hours discovering Blogs, Flickr, Delicious and Twitter. I have visited a lot of blog sites - been amazed!! These experiences have fed my imagination and I feel some new things will be possible. For example, I have long toyed with the notion of having an academic website i.e. one designed for me by a webmaster, where I could upload and store documents, and where people could visit and comment and read my material. Maybe a blog is a first step in that direction?

Frustrations.
I got a bit frustrated when I discovered that I wasn't able to chat. I had sent out invitations to chat but noticed that on my availability column I was seeing NO whereas others displayed YES. Well I had to get to YES. Patsy drew my attention to the browser and guess who hadn't Java installed ? This minor glitch has been sorted now and I have been throwing out invitations to chat to all and sundry - making up for lost time as it were.

I tend to get frustrated with unexplained abbreviations - though it hasn't been too bad in this course so far. Because there is a mix of experiences it is inevitable, I suppose, that I should come across those who are vastly more experienced in this métier than I am. That is good. What is less good is of course is the use of abbreviations. On my first seconds online I met f2f ('face-to-face') and VLE (Virual Learning Environment) and a couple of others as well which I couldn't work out. Of course I use some of them now myself, but abbreviations thrown in too freely, can throw a tyro like me. David Hopkins was very good on his blog, he used full expressions and then in brackets the abbreviations - e.g. LMS's, CMSs. Very user friendly. Though I still haven't worked out how to post a comment on his blog. Word Press ask for username and password - I assumed it meant mine but when I give them it very unkindly refuses me entry.

Activities.
I have been reading quite a lot online: answers to the various tasks such as icebreaking, benefits of e learning. Also have been reading blogs and discovered that many are starters like myself. Anyway I have started to get to know the people I will be working with. I decided to try out as much as possible. Get launched into it, not too not to engage in too much face-to-face ( f2f) - Virual Learning Environment (VLE) comparisons. I set up my Blog, Flickr and began to Twitter. Had a couple of very short chats. Already I have learned quite a bit about social software tools. But it will take quite a bit of time and practice to really get behind their scope and flexibility.

Ownership

This log will be my personal recording of learning experiences in the Online Tutoring Course. It will be public, and it will contain the following self reflexive records:

• experiences
  
• questions
  
• observations
  
• developments
• implications
  

Key learning factors in my experience

Developing an active identity. I think I reached my turn in the road as a kid when I learned that if I stayed passive I would be lost. I failed the 11+ or qualifying exam, so landed in secondary school. That would not have been so very bad, but that I landed in a 'special' class. Today it would probably be a 'pupils with special needs' class. At that time it was just the 'bottom of the heap'. Many of the other pupils just couldn't read or write. I felt really bad and out-of-place. Then I started to take steps - for me then frightening steps - to get into another class, later another school and eventually to university.
Being part of a group but getting spotted. I think I learned best when I felt least vulnerable. This had a lot to do with finding a place in 'the class'. I often needed to be 'background' but I knew deep down that I needed to be found. It was a kind of cat and mouse thing. One teacher, Hazael Cathcart, managed to spot me. This is how it happened.
I had just made the transition from secondary school to grammar school. It was a culture shock, I was a kid from the housing estate from the working class, we were 'yobs' they were 'snobs' (actually we had more colourful descriptions for them, and actually, until I corrected this attitude, I was the 'snob') I felt insecure and became quiet and introverted, I enjoyed Hazael she was kind of exotic in her chalky black teachers gown with her hair in a mess and her crazy way of looking over her glasses. Yet, for all her scatty appearance, she spotted me! I was of course unaware of this, since she would have had no favourites. On the day the A-Level results came out, (I was working in a shop part-time), Hazael suddenly appeared and told me that I had obtained an A in her subject. We had a really hearty conversation, the first outside of the teacher/pupil relationship. She left a letter for me which I noticed only after she had gone. In it she said knew I had potential and that she wasn't surprised that I had got an A.
Cool Learning. These experiences will always be key to my ability to learn, and they infuse my teaching methodology. I have never bullied students to speak, I know some need the undergrowth and the quietness, but I try to spot them in that undergrowth. Learning is about securing personal identity and as a teacher, securing learning environments, and locating uniqueness.

Thoughts about f2f teaching experiences

Here are some negatives and positives that I experienced in f2f tutorial environment.
Negatives

1. conflicting expectations - of students, tutor and department.
   
2. student passivity - students wanted a second lecture, dept wanted debate, tutor wanted student preparation for tutorials
   
3. lack of preparation - was the reality for many, some prepared and didn't discuss, a very few prepared and discussed.
   
4. superficial discussion - from those who hadn't prepared clogged up the space for those who had something worth saying.
   

Positives in f2f tutorial environment

1. community was possible - students enjoyed sitting and talking before the tutorial began or walking with me part of the way home together.
   
2. disciplining was possible - but this tended only to get to the egregious cases
   
3. authenticity of participants could be established - students could size me up and I them. Discipline and encouragement was taking place within established understandings of who we were.

My thoughts about the tutorial environment in SA

1. Tutorials should be voluntary. If students didn't come then that was their choice. I disliked having to take a roll call every class and I thought this only reinforced the old template of school pupils and teacher - student dependency in other words.
   
2. Assignments were important, but encouraged students to prepare only for those specific topics they would be assessed on. That meant their knowledge was patchy, they wanted me, especially nearing exams to fill in those holes in their knowledge - not only in terms of course material, but revision and exams techniques.
3. I would have had a couple of tutorials set aside for spontaneous assessments. Perhaps a multiple choice question paper or a paper in which answers would have been no more than a paragraph in length or perhaps a question requiring a short essay of perhaps 2 sides max. The design would have been looking to assess breadth of knowledge.
   
4. Set assignments would have continued to be part of the course but shorter and still aiming for depth.
   

My good VLE practice regime

As I read new material and input by other participants in this online tutoring course, I sometimes feel adrift. There seem to be so many communicative possibilities in the VLE all coming at me from different directions. What kind of throws me a bit, is all the assumed knowledge that goes on in the communicative interactions of others. For example I had to look up VLE and f2f presented a puzzle to me to begin with ... remember this is someone who associates f with the f*** word!! Well I got it eventually, but all these abbreviations and all the new communicative possibilities are a challenge. As I was saying in one of the online assignments (benefits of e learning) it is all down to attitude. I make what I will of each environment f2f and VLE, they can be both invaluable. Here is my good practices list:

1. stop head spinning
2. stop saying f word when unknown abbreviations appear
3. stop comparing negatively VLE and f2f

So these are my don't do's .... now my do's list

1. Try it all out (go for a twitter)
   
2. Communicate, communicate, communicate (the three c's of VLE!)
3. Practice, practice, practice (three p's of life!)
   

The Towns I love so well!

I come originally from the north west of Ireland, from a small village called Magheramason. It is set in the lush green of the Foyle valley and in the distance you can see the cathedral spires of the city of Derry, and beyond that the hills of Donegal, where my father's people came from. I grew up in the troubles, and like many others I have no memory of the times before the troubles began, therefore all my memories of home are set against the backdrop of that time. I attended school in the city and later read Philosophy and Political Science at Queen's University Belfast. I graduated in 1983 and went back to live in Derry. In 1986 I went to work in Germany, and there I married Ingrid and together established our little family and business. We have three children, now all well grown, so hardly children anymore – they are 18, 19 and 20 years old. In 2004 after a number of years running our small Irish Craft shop in Heidelberg and on the internet, I returned to Queens to do an MA in International Relations. After that I was given the opportunity to do a PhD in St. Andrews in 2006 and I jumped at the chance. I am researching Islam in the European sphere and I hope to be finished this year. I have tutored second year students in the school of International relations and that has been a richly rewarding experience. I would like to teach and pursue my academic research in the future. The towns I love so well are Derry, Belfast, Heidelberg and St. Andrews.

P.S. There is a picture of Ingrid and myself on our homepage. Just follow this link www.tinneys-irish-shop.com

Blogging

Blog, blogging, blogosphere - these are words which I have heard often enough, yet I have no working experience of them. My daughter tells me blogging is fun. But then she's a socially networked savvy, able to do a lot of things at once - texting, talking, listening to the radio, having breakfast - whereas I generally do things one at a time and tend to find radios a distracting nuisance. Though blogging is new for me, and feels a bit unusual at the moment, I am sure I will get the hang of it. I'm already beginnning to feel it might be fun.