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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The Instagram Challenge: an individual adventure

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Sunday morning. Reflecting on this "Instagram week", two points came up to me.

First, the fact that each daily challenge had specific rules expanded my knowledge and practice of some features I never use (reel, poll, story). I was thus able to see how those features could be of value in instructional strategies, by asking learners to ask thoughtful questions or by summarizing reflections about a theme discussed within a group of learners on social media.

Second, I was surprised to realize I experienced this challenge as an individual, almost lonely adventure. My actions were more focused on how to use Instagram's features accordingly rather than building Networked Knowledge Activities (NKA). And the fact that the activity did not gather many of us in EME6414 consolidates my feeling. This second conclusion bothered me a little but I then approached it in a different way: the course encourages all of us to explore and experiment with a lot of Web 2.0-related tools, some we never used or even heard before. Consequently, throughout the course and activities, we might all be disseminated on Web 2.0, leading to a "dilution effect" enhancing the feeling of individual adventure. Also, at least for me, the course content deals with very new topics that require time to integrate and reflect upon. For these reasons, I view our activities more as small experimentations rather than fully authentic social learning experiences, and I keep this in mind when I feel some frustration while tracking reactions and interactions to the things I post online.

In any case, I had fun with this challenge this week, and it was just what I could handle looking back at my overloaded and stressful days at work. And like each Sunday, I feel I went through a version upgrade of myself, with some more understanding of how people learn in their online environment.

You'll find my contributions to the Instagram Challenge on my home page. It was a whole challenge itself but I finally managed to embed my Instagram feed on my home page :-).

Comments

  1. DaeunJuly 10, 2023 at 1:24 PM

    Considering that more people have participated in the Twitter days of the week challenge, Twitter might be more popular among our class. Also Instagram seems to be not really suitable for sharing activities if we see how its main feed works compared to Twitter...

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