I honestly can’t say that I learned a lot of content knowledge in this class but it’s not because it wasn’t taught well or the topics were poorly chosen. It’s because I have taken this class out of order. I am one class and an internship away from graduating the E-Learning program so I have seen most of this before. I am the tech coordinator for a school and it is my job to know much of the application knowledge.
With all that said I thought this was a nice class to practice a few of the things I had been taught earlier. I normally don’t get into web 2.0 stuff, but in this class I was a little more interested in it because I was moving through the assignments so quickly. I wish I would have taken the classes in order because having the foundations in this class would have made some other classes have fewer growing pains as I was struggling to keep pace with my peers who had already had the foundation.
I think the greatest thing I learned in this class was through my interaction with Scott McLeod. I went into that blog posting with guns blazing and wrongfully attacked someone who actually cares about education. I have been really jaded by the amount of money that is spent on consults to “fix” education because I know that a lot of teachers get sick of being in the classroom and realize that if you can market a “silver bullet” to an educational problem then schools will spend a fortune on your speakers and materials. I really had to challenge my assumption that everyone not directly involved at the school level is just out to make money (education profiteering) or pushing a narrow agenda. I think through that I became much more open to hearing from consultants and professionals.
I really needed to challenge this mindset because it is not good for me professionally if I am skeptical of everyone. It makes me an outsider and a poor example of a collaborator.
