end of week 1 #oldsmooc thoughts

Did I get to where I wanted to be om week 1?

I guessed/hoped some outcomes for week 1 before starting. These were:

My objectives for week 1

  • Join a team and/or form one, preferably around a design challenge that is interesting to me. Well, I am kind of on the fringes of a team and I’m finding it hard to see how to form a team and it is around a fairly loosely specified challenge that interests me 🙂 Not really sure how we are going to bring that forward though… Unexpectedly, there are a whole load of projects that interest me, so I am hoping I can keep and eye on those and maybe dip in to them too 🙂
  • Start to describe that design challenge. Err right… Well it isn’t mine so others have kind of described their challenges and I guess the next thing is for me to comment on those.
  • Revise & feel more confident about how I define Learning Design. Right well, hmmm, see below…

Possible measures

  • Am I in a team by Jan 14th 2013? Sort of, we got a Google Circle, we got some clouds…http://cloudworks.ac.uk/tag/view/oldsmooc_language
  • Is the teams’ focus something that interests me? Yep, definitely… to the extent that we have a focus at this stage. That is going to be one of the next things we need to do…
  • Do we have an initial description of the design challenge we want to address? I guess I’ll want to look at the criteria around describing a design challenge to evaluate the extent to which we meet that objective. Err, no. Well certainly not a team one.
  • If I was asked to explain what I meant by ‘learning design’ at a job interview could I do it in a sentence in a way that held the interviewer’s attention and sold me as a desireable person to work with… Or something like that 😉 Not sure how I’m going to assess that. By going to some job interviews perhaps?

So here goes for learning design ( I guess I am more interested in the practice of designing for learning than the discipline of Learning Design – see the LD on LD).

My learning design practice involves: thinking out and implementing environments and trajectories of interactions that I believe are likely to engage others and lead to useful learning; attempting to enact and help others enact these trajectories; being open and responsive to emerging opportunities; allowing others to take control. All of that in a creative & rigorous way of course 😉 and with an eye to making it easy to evaluate and modify the designs and re-use and adapt them.

Of course that is an ideal. I always operate under constraints including lack of time, skill, knowledge, competence, motivation and that’s not to mention external constraints introduce by learners and other stakeholders, and of course nothing ever goes quite as expected and I make lots of mistakes, but I try to learn from them….

I liked this tweet today. Got me wondering what the Learning Designer’s job would be in that situation? Makes sure as many survive as possible? Only the fittest? Guess it depends…

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