EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education – An open course from the Faculty of Education, University of Regina.

We have completed our first week of EC&I 831. For a complete overview of our first synchronous session, see the September 8/09 outline and the recorded Elluminate session. This post will outline some of the highlights and help prepare us for next week’s class.

The September 8/09 session was a private session with for-credit students only. There are currently 20 for-credit students in the course, and I am happy to see that several of you have now added your profiles to the for-credit Student Directory. If you haven’t, I am hoping that you will add your profile in the next week or so.

You may be wondering why this first session was a private session before we bring in the non-credit students. If so, you may want to read two posts I wrote earlier this year: “Visualizing Open/Networked Teaching” and “Visualizing Open/Networked Teaching: Revisited“. In a nutshell, I am attempting to help prepare you for an open learning environment, something that you may not be used to as a student. It can be somewhat overwhelming, and for some, a bit scary. I want to make sure that your needs as a learner are being served. I hope that you will feel safe and comfortable in this environment. And, perhaps most importantly, I hope that you understand that I am here to support you throughout this experience.

As a learner myself, I have been fortunate to have discovered a rich network of educators who have helped me become a better educator and learner. You will get a chance to meet many of these people throughout this course. They will be there to learn with you, teach you, and in many cases, they may support you in your growth as you support theirs. These include the excellent presenters we have lined-up for the next 13 weeks, the 180+ non-credit participants that have signed up for the course (so far), the many edubloggers you will read, and likely people popping in on our synchronous sessions via Twitter. In the past, the generosity of people in my learning network has been greatly appreciated, and if we are lucky, we may meet people along the way that will help support this experience. In return, it will be important for us to also share our learning with the world, to pay forward, and to take on a few risks along the way.

The illustration below somewhat represents this type of learning experience. You may feel that you are to the far left of this experience, in a more traditional frame of reference. By the end of the course, I hope that you will be able to see yourself closer to the right as you develop your own personal learning network and find sustainable learning connections that go well beyond the time-frame of this course.

Now for a few reminders for next week. By now you should have:

1. Familiarized yourself with the course wiki and assessments for the course.
2. Created a Wordpress blog and sent me your URL. Once I have your URL, I will add it to this aggregated list of course blogs (you’ll be able to see all blog posts here).
3. Created a Delicious, Google, and Twitter (optional) account. We will need these accounts active for next class.
4. You have be familiar with our course tags. For all general course posts (in Wordpress, Flickr, Youtube, etc.), use ‘eci831‘ (for instance, I used that tag for this very blog post). For readings you’d recommend via Delicious, I’d suggest ‘eci831readings‘. For tools you’d recommend (via Delicious), I’d suggest ‘eci831tools‘. We will discuss tagging again next week, both in how to tag, and how to search for tagged content. This will be an important concept for this course.
5. You should have posted an introductory blog post (more info here).

Our next session will be held in Elluminate, 7:00 p.m. SK. Time. (GMT -6), Tuesday September 15/09. I will be leading the session, discussing open and networked learning, and will focus on many of the skills that we will need to connect to each other and to others. We will also be meeting many of the non-credit students, and I am looking forward to welcoming everyone to this collaborative experience.

The URL of the next session is http://moourl.com/eci831live. Talk to you all Tuesday!