How could someone else make use of my slides?

 

When I started teaching my first classes, more than 10 years ago, I often felt insecure and nervous. What if the students asked questions I couldn’t answer or if I got so nervous that I was lost in the middle of the lecture? To feel more secure, my slides were so overloaded with “complete-sentence” bullet points that they could probably have been published and understood without my participation as a teacher. But back then, I wasn’t even familiar with the concept of open resources.

Now, when I am a more confident teacher and have learnt what works and not in the class room, my slides are there just to support the audience in following the structure of my lectures. They often contain no more than the outline and the subject headings, possibly one or two really important definitions, and one or two take-home messages that I keep repeating throughout the lecture.

I realize that my “old” slides would have been very useful as an open educational resource, since you didn’t even have to attend the lecture to understand them. But what about my “new” slides?
Students need context to learn, and when I teach students they see me as a medical doctor or researcher from their department and potentially also as a role-model, which may enhance their learning. Moreover, I can relate to other areas they have just been introduced to- “as my colleague Peter explained to you yesterday…”.

The Reusability Paradox. Figure by Wiley 2004. Published under a CC-­BY license.

Wiley’s paradox  states that reusability and pedagogical effectiveness of learning objects are completely orthagonal to each other. I think that my personal experience shows just that. What works really well for my learners in the class room- less busy slides, more spontaneous interaction with the teacher- hinders dissemination of my slides as simple learning objects.

Luckily, there are new technical solutions available today that make audio and video content easier to make, so that  learners outside my class room could potentially take part of the same lecture as the learners in my class room. Perhaps I should try to add a voice recording to my next lecture when sharing it on Slideshare? 

 

Reference: Wiley, D. (2004). The Reusability Paradox. Connexions http://cnx.org/contents/­dad41956-­­c2b2-­­4e01-­­94b4-­4a871783b021@19.

In the no man’s land between digital skills and digital literacy

I missed this week’s PBL-meeting and the webinar and am trying to catch-up during spare time between meetings and patients, using the different online resources.

This scattered reading and watching of videos have been eye-openers to me. The distinction between being a digital visitor and a digital resident  was something that I had never thought about. Watch this video by David White at the university of Oxford  if you’d like to learn more.  I guess that we all start out as visitors and that time, habit, interest and training may make some of us residents in the digital world. After some additional reading about the difference between being in posession of digital skills and being digitally literate, I conclude that I may be in the no man’s land on the border to digital literacy.

One important part of being digitally literate is fact checking. The online book “Web Literacy for Fact Checkers” by Mike Caulfield (shared by Sara Mörtsell) may be one of the best course books I have ever read. The thoughts and recommendations are very clearly expressed, with a perfect guide for beginner’s like me how to go from being digitally skilled to being digitally literate. It’s mostly about fact checking, and I have discovered sites like snopes.com and politifact.com- how have I ever dared to share posts and articles before checking them? And I totally recognize how easy it is to share content that evokes emotions, whether it is happiness or anger, without spending even a few seconds fact checking before pressing “share”. If you’re going to read ONE thing this week- go for this book.

Note: this post was originally written a few weeks ago for Topic 1, but not published until today, March 19

Steep learning curve

After the first week of ONL171, I am still curious about the learning objectives of this course. They are probably available somewhere on the course site, but  I have been so busy learning how to navigate in Google+, use the Adobe Connect platform,  blog, and finally make a  video for the PBL group presentation, that I haven’t had the time to look for them.

Nevertheless, the learning curve this week has been so steep that I don’t really care if there are any learning objectives or not. The essential thing is that I am learning- a lot!

If I have to pick one thing that may change the way I interact with my students and co-workers, I would say that it is the Adobe Connect platform. For me, as a Karolinska Institutet affiliate, I can use it for free to set up meetings and invite collaborators all over the world. Such a great resource.

I would love to post a sneak preview of my film, but might have to wait until our official PBL-group presentation is on air 🙂 Have a nice weekend!

First webinar- the multi-tasking challenge

This is the first week of the ONL171, Open networked learning course. As many busy people of today, I am struggling to avoid multi-tasking while participating in online meetings and webinars and to focus on the discussions and the content of the webinar.

As I write this blog post, I am at the same time participating in the first webinar. I am impressed by the online platform that allows more than 50 persons around the world to be connected to the 3 teachers at the same time.

In previous online meetings that I have participated in,  I have identified factors that help me to focus and stop multitasking:

• a certain pace is necessary- once it gets too slow I start doing other things
• it helps if there are interactive tasks
• turning my camera on stops me from multitasking, because people see what I do
• the  discussions or webinars should be on topics  where a live meeting is necessary – such as discusssions, sharing of experiences etc. Online meetings/webinars are not a good forum to transfer information that could just as well be shared in a written document.

Having written this blog post, I promise to try staying focused next time we have an online meeting 🙂

 

My first blog post on the #ONL171 course

I have started this blog to document my progress during a course in open networked learning, #ONL171

I am working as a pediatrician at Sachs’ Children and Youth hospital in Stockholm, Sweden and as a researcher in perinatal epidemiology at the Karolinska Institutet.