Blogged confessions

In my two posts this week on Nicenet I have tried to collate and take stock of what I have learned during these two months and a half at Webskills – and I can say that I feel  - absolutely modestly but still – triumphant. Thanks to a great course and a superb tutor and my study mates, I think I’ve learnt a lot.

This post is now to reflect on where I failed or what I did not try at all. There are 2-3 major issues that I just did not somehow come to digest. These are, rubrics, the ABCD thinking and – last but not least, properly following and commenting my study mates’ posts on Nicenet and their blogs. Now the last little failure is just bad management of time and lack of inner discipline so let that one go without more saying - but the other two:  the rubrics thing I have written about earlier when we were working on it: this is something we do not really do much in my country where we are more formative than summative anyway in our assessment– but I admit using rubrics might add goals and accuracy to our teaching learning (and my work!) – but they should definitely be supporting learner autonomy and formative assessment in general. And lo and behold: the new curricula of 2016 that we are working on with basic education as our target at the moment and high school education very soon too, are in a way rubrics or matrixes with three columns: goals, content and criteria (of good proficiency). Have to think of that, definitely – are we going the rubrics way?

The other thing I never got to grips with was the Audience – Behavior – Condition – Degree approach to tasks. Is this “alphabet” simply something that pertains much more the learning and working philosophies in the US and elsewhere in the world – than in my country? Is it typically Finnish to host an aversion against rigorous paradigms within your daily tasks? Why do I suspect there is a Tayloristic mechanism under the ABCD?

Does it not make sense that while working, you look at your tasks, regularly, from the points who you are working with and for, what they are expected to learn or perform, under what conditions, and how much they should be producing by way of learning or other outputs? Have to talk to my colleagues about this - is this just me who am hopelessly vague about my working approaches? Can I just rely on my intuition?

Be that as it may, it is intriguing. So has been this path that I have walked through in the amazing world of web learning. Now I am standing at the end of it - and already looking forward to meeting my Webskills partners again on the web, only it will be different paths. But what else would be so agile an environment as the web - to guarantee that it will even be easy for us to meet again, some sunny day.