It’s two weeks today since I joined #humanMOOC. I have enjoyed it perhaps as a course and definitely as conversations on twitter – hence the hashtag. It’s been great to deepen my acquaintance with people I knew already, to meet new people and to chew the fat on the subject of how we learn online, how we think we can help students learn online and the connection between the two. It’s been enjoyable and useful to think about the place of instructor video in establishing teacher presence with Laura Gibbs and Andy Nobes.
Any exploration of learning inevitably moves to meta-levels. Considering learning with technology particularly involves a reflexive element due to recurring novelty. This is exciting and can become distracting.
I never really committed time to the stream mode to the course, instead I found myself stepping through the hashtag into the garden and the course fading out of view except as a clearing in social media for conversations. Those conversations and connections draw me back to the course, to ask what it is that has brought us together and what we’re trying to learn.
Learning and Unlearning 
Thanks for sharing your blog post at Twitter, Paul – that’s where I found it! I’m a late convert to Twitter, but it was the use of the hashtag for Connected Courses MOOC that showed me how powerfl it can be, and I’m finding the same for #HumanMOOC. I had so much fun romping through the hashtag this morning, and I’m sure there will be some more intriguing, thought-provoking, useful, fun etc. stuff when I come back and check again later! 🙂
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Hi Laura, I keep rediscovering Twitter. It’s a great way to connect and keep up to date with developments, but I find that to get most out of it in terms of developing a PLN, a lot has to be put in, which means time. I have months on end off twitter and always find it has something to offer when I come back.
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Paul, what an exquisite reflection:
“….I found myself stepping through the hashtag into the garden and the course fading out of view except as a clearing in social media for conversations.”
I couldn’t help thinking of Monet, the origin of symposium as banquet and accompanying conversation, and then Jacques Barzun’s definition of conversation as the sifting of opinions
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Thanks Vanessa, now I read it back, it’s not bad is it? I’m currently following a doctoral programme that has residential weekends three times a year and I have the same feeling about those weekends: an a la carte feast of shared reflection, connection, emotion and experience.
Symposium as a banquet makes perfect sense, of course, and thanks for directing me towards Barzun, whom I’d never heard of but have added to my ‘must read’ list (yes, it’s a very long list!).
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