Wednesday 9 October 2013

Restarting the Blog Thing

So - I've decided to restart the Blog thing. I can see the value of writing down my thoughts and thinking and presenting my metacognition in written form. I'm just not sure I feel confident enough to share it with anyone. We'll see ...

So - in my Master's program, my brain is exploding! I'm taking the 1st of 10 courses for the M.Ed, through UOIT. It's all done online, through Adobe Connect - a synchronous chat room. The 2 courses I'm taking are Research Methods in Education and Social and Cultural Context in Education. Both courses are vastly different in content, professor, delivery and student complement and I'm loving both of them.

Research Methods seems very high-level to me, in one way. I've never taken any research courses, so I feel a bit like I'm swimming upstream - but I am still swimming! In this course, we are being pushed, somewhat, to decide on our research focus and on the type of delivery we want to choose (project, thesis, portfolio). I have 3 areas that I'm looking at and I just can't decide which one I want to choose, because they are all so interesting! Despite (or maybe because of?) the brain stretching that I'm experiencing, I love this course and the content and even the prospect of completing the assignments! I wonder if I'll say this once I get the marks back ....?

The Social and Cultural context course is challenging in a more reflective way. It's a course where we are presented with ideas and phenomena and asked to reflect on them within our own practice. The readings are in this course are more in number, but not necessarily as dense as those in the Research Methods course. The instructor is a sociolinguist, which is quite fascinating. The assignments in this course are also interesting in that we have to respond to a certain number of Discussion questions and we have to create 5 Wiki entries. I like this variance!

So - thanks to the encouragement of Aviva Dunsiger (@avivaloca) or http://adunsiger.com/ for restarting this blog thing and to Doug Peterson (@dougpete) or http://dougpete.wordpress.com/
Not only are they wonderful cheerleaders, but they also provide great Blog exemplars!

Tomorrow - my 3 ideas for this colossal endeavour called the MASTERS!

4 comments:

  1. Congratulations on the blog reboot. It sounds like you're going to be very busy with your Master's work. Hopefully, you'll be able to leverage this blog as a way to reach out for ideas or just to use it as a place to share your learning. Either way, I wish you all the best.

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    1. Thanks so much for the encouragement, Doug! I'm learning so much it's hard to channel it into words!

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  2. Congratulations!! I'm so glad that you started blogging. Just from talking to you at ECOO last year, I know how much you have to share, and how much you manage to share in 140 characters or less on Twitter. I can't wait to learn from you more here. And I love how you committed to another post too -- what a great idea!

    Looking forward to reading more from you!
    Aviva

    P.S. Thanks for the kind words as well! I'n honoured to be included beside Doug as a great blogger example!

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    1. Ahh - thank YOU! Hoping I can do as well on my blogs as you seem to on yours .... Cheers!

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