Task 14: Final reflections

The course of New Interactive Environments (NIE) is coming to an end and here are my reflections on the last couple of months.

Before I go on with my personal experience, observations and suggestions, I'd like to say that it actually depends very much on whether the course was supposed to be rather theoretical or more practical. Without a doubt, Terje and Sebastian provided us with adequate reading materials and useful theories. If the meaning of the term 'interactivity' was somewhat blurred to some us before, then it should be quite clear now. I enjoyed searching for my own understanding of interactivity, one of the "apply theory in practice" kind of tasks.

So, half of the purpose of the course was well achieved. Before analyzing or using any interactive environments, it is necessary to understand what interactivity is, how it can be measured and what difference it makes to us in the world of digitally mediated interaction. However, I feel we didn't take full advantage of the possibilities to make the course itself interactive, and this is not brickbat on the facilitators' address only. I remember Terje and Sebastian tried to squeeze out some activity from us, participants, during the first and the second Flashmeeting session, but what do you do with these reserved and buttoned-up Estonians, right?

Anyway, although there seemed to be a certain reason why the organization of the course remained rather secretive, I personally would have preferred to know the topics we were going to learn in advance, in a well set out course layout. I believe this would have made the learning process more effective. Referring to the same Flashmeeting session where we tried to simultaneously write things down in Piratepad, it would have worked out better if we had been given a more concrete task, or would have known the destination we were moving to. Only later (with Task 11) it probably made more sense what we were doing back then. Talking about the communication tools, I found Skype very practical in another course where we had a weekly Wednesday night group chat. It's better to follow, the chat history is saved and can be read afterwards even if you can't be present during the chat but are in the group. Flashmeeting kept logging me off, especially when we used Piratepad at the same time.

I'd like to suggest combining different forms of course participation (blog posts, forum, group chat, wiki). In NIE, all the tasks followed the same structure: read an article, explore the theory and put out a post on your Weblog. This generated reviews and summaries on the same articles in 10 different rewordings (formulations) but at the same time limited the outcome to a very few examples. To be able to analyze my experiences with NIE, I have to compare it with the other online courses I took this semester. In one of them, where we knew the topics for each of the 14 weeks, all of us were given the same weekly task but the task usually had different outcomes, because we were mostly asked to find an example to represent the topic of the week. This made reading other students' blog posts more interesting as all of them taught something new. A good way to follow these posts could be social bookmarking as done, for example, in the PLENK2010 course. Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds which allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

The other night we had our small pre Christmas dinner with some IMKE students and we discussed a little bit about the courses of this semester. Most of us agreed that online courses, although they are supposed to enable independent learning, should still include some more teaching. It's easy to get lost from the right path when you are trying to make sense of the material alone. Most of the times students are given the option to ask when they have a question (by e-mail or other form), but they often don't bother. Yet these questions, hesitations and mistakes can be noticed by the facilitators when they read through the blog posts. I would personally appreciate it a lot if the facilitators brought them up in the following group chat and explained both where we nailed it and where we missed the guess. I would also appreciate it if there were some explanations and thoughts written about specific topics also by the facilitators before students are asked to carry out a task on it, as in a traditional class where lecturer first explains something, shares the knowledge, and then comes the homework.

These are my feelings about the first semester. I took three online courses. And it took me some time to get used to it as during my Bachelor, which I finished 4 years ago, I probably only had a few of them altogether. I sometimes struggled to find motivation to go through the material by myself, other times I missed listening rather than reading, but I'm glad I'm learning so much new and absolutely intriguing things that IMKE has got to offer. And I'd like to thank Terje (and Sebastian) for being part of it and for putting their effort into it.