digital lifeboat

Christopher Sessums (if you do not read his blog weekly you are missing a deep well of resources) reflects on

So what are you blogging for? Why is it your business to blog? (Pssst… pass it on.)

http://eduspaces.net/csessums/weblog/339519.html

So I thought I would look back to my first blog post, two years ago.

I started blogging to ensure that my “notebook” was on line and accessible everywhere. It seemed to me that if I was going to study on line I should where ever possible work on line.

I then got interested in reflective writing and reflection as part of the learning cycle. A new concept to me and a missing link in my personal development particularly in my work.

The next phase was moving from a personal journal in an institutional VLE plus personal blog,  to joining an online community and the cross fertilisation of ideas from commenting and reading other blogs.

So where now for this blog at the end of the second year. Why is it my business to blog?

The learning journey is not over and the reflective process is embedded in my routines now. The resources of the past two years are readily accessible in my “digital lifeboat” and ready to be mined again in the future when needed.

It is now a significant part of my learning process. The video on Sessums post above gives lots of good reasons why blogging is a process of personal self discovery. Bloggers speak of their compulsion to read and comment on the reflections of others. One talks about self disclosure and privacy. Another of learning from their students reflections on them.

I think one of the greatest appeals is that it is a creative form of communication. This semseter I have made little effort to augment my blog with video or graphics. That is something to develop in the future

 The final course activity for this unit is to

“Write short summary on “project management in an eLearning environment”

Lots to sum up and I am going to come at this subject from different angles.

Strategic thinking and planning.

It is clear that there is a lot of work in formulating a strategy for an E-learning project. I think that Don Morrison’s book did an excellent job of laying out all the issues. It was also a very readable and inspiring book, destined I hope to be a guide for the future.  I used his structure to form the basis of my report. 

Project Management

This must be a very challenging issue when managing a large team working on different aspects of the development. It is difficult to reflect accurately on this from the micro level. As I stated at the outset I am used to managing a very small team of three. I think I have learned from the experiences of others in the group the difficulties of drawing information out of a large organisation. This has been rather sobering in comparison with my organisation who seem much more transparent by comparison.

One of the things which I have discovered in this process, though looking at effort estimation, is how expensive good learning materials are to generate. I did a costing exercise for delivering my strategy and found that that it would pretty much take me the equivalent of my current part time job to deliver the project in a year. I knew it would be costly but not how much. This sets more of a context to the impetus to re use content, and to accurately catalogue resources.

 Another aspect, the effort estimation and planning for the report writing. I gained time by writing long posts on the weekly topics, which then formed the body of the report. This spread the effort evenly across the semester much more successfully than in the previous three units. It is clear that time spent planning effort and sheduling is well invested.

 I learned a lot about managing change particularly aspects of communication. It seems to me from my understanding of projects we have studied, that delivering a project in increments is a good way of building confidence within an organisation where cultural change is required

I think I have mentioned elsewhere my new found addiction to SWOT and TOWS analysis as a form of mental relaxation rather like doing crosswords! Rather like my discovery of enjoying blogging and reflective writing in previous semesters.

In truth I found that I was already able to think in a strategic manner without using the matrices, and comparing my thoughts with a later structured analysis arrive at virtually the same conclusion.

I have enjoyed this semester. The emphasis on strategy, planning and report writing was relatively easy for me by comparison with the previous large website projects.

So that as they say is a wrap. The report is written and will be delivered during week 12.

I am working on a summary to be delivered to school. That is quite a challenge in itself and will take some time, fortunately I have a couple of weeks in hand to work on this.

Thinking about how to structure this Journal in response to the *reflective writing* lecture. Have decided to use the blogg as my main notebook, mainly because it is accessible anywhere and fits with the on line learning experiance. Also it is somewhat *other* to the learning jounal on webct. I think I will use this for jottings and thoughts and to some extent re visiting ideas, as I can comment on my entries at later dates. I will then having reflected on these notes put something more considered into the learning journal within web ct.

Have started to attack reading with *post its*. Will transfer post it type thoughts up here.