Thank you

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This is it! Tonight is my last official post for EME6414, Summer 2023. What to write about? If you had asked me a few hours earlier, my honest answer would have been "no idea". It's not I don't have anything on my mind (I may have too much actually), but I was not sure how to approach this last post. So, I've decided I'll do just as usual and draw a few personal reflections. To help me tackle this last challenge, I went back to Canvas and get an overview of our Modules Main Page. Gosh, what a journey it has been! The first image that comes to my mind is the iceberg metaphor. You know, this impression that for years, you had been exploring the World Wide Web with confidence, as if you were in your own neighborhood, with your own habits, hanging out with the same people, getting what you were looking for, not less, not more. And one day, you realize that you were just scratching the surface and that a whole world was lying underneath, inviting you to a whole new...
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Perfect Timing

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Since my first day as a lucky FSU student, I focused on connecting my learning to my work as a junior instructional designer. Hopefully, I have been able to conduct individual and group projects on various topics of interest for my professional activities. Those included learning how to analyze the credibility of research articles with an eLearning module developed on Storyline, how to engage students with a 30-minute lesson on Canva, or conducting an inquiry-based project to identify formal and informal sources of learning in my workplace.

This week, I started exploring Networked Knowledge Activities in our course while preparing an evaluation of a one-year course program for apprentices enrolled in their first year of agro-food engineering studies. The students' supervisor wanted my help to design, develop and facilitate this evaluation in order to collect data that could be useful for students (apprentices) but also for faculty and for their mentors at work. He mentioned we had two meetings next week with the students, one on Tuesday and one the next morning. Pressure's on.

Long story short, I was planning to work on this task today. Reading about the Networked Knowledge Activities (NKA) before my working day brought an unexpected but more-than-welcome help to my Tuesday mission. In order to meet every network interest (the students, the faculty, and the mentors), I thought relying on the core NKA could make sense.

Hence, here is as what I suggested today to the supervisor:

"What about co-constructing this evaluation with the students? On Tuesday, we could ask students to share their anonymous feedback on paper and ask them to state what worked well this year, what could be improved, and what could be implemented. We then would collect their papers. The next day, we could review their notes and curate them with the students to identify what actions should be maintained, which ones could be challenging, which actions could help to anticipate or solve encountered issues, and which were the new elements or actions apprentices would like to see implemented next year. Throughout the session, we would collectively negotiate the findings and eventually construct a formal evaluation defining what this year has been like and what would be the plan for next year."

There's no doubt I was influenced by this week's topic, even if I realized it much more clearly once I submitted my plan to the supervisor. But NKA definitely makes sense to connect and construct knowledge between various networks. And I liked how NKAs seem to be applicable both online and offline.

End of story: the supervisor was thrilled, mostly because this NKA-inspired strategy seems to meet the interest of all stakeholders. And here we go. We have a plan for next week! I'll tell you how it went!

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