reflection on course 12470-00002 facilitation

it’s exactly the 2 weeks’ mark from the first lesson of the 2nd run of ICT for SDL and CoL Clinic course that i am facilitating. this time round, i have 7 participants, 3 less than the first. the make up of this group is very unique: 2 CL master teacher colleagues, 2 ex-NIE students, and 3 other eager pairs of eyes that i met for the first time. it’s always exciting to befriend new fellow CL teachers and catch up with ‘old’ CL teacher friends/colleagues alike (:

so how did the online interactions go so far? to-date, 3 online activities i’ve designed as part of the online interactions were initiated. the 1st introductory post was completed without much difficulties, and the “1+2” interactions too. good job teacher participants!

the 2nd post on SDL streamed in more slowly. there was not a single post past the deadline. i emailed a gentle a reminder and was glad to see one post appearing soon after. and another, and another, and soon the rest came in. all except one, cos the teacher is away in shanghai on a study trip. there was a case of OPAL script causing trouble, and a participant lost all her effort and time in the posting work! need to remember to highlight such possibility to participants in future, and suggest some precautionary measures. my bad for forgetting to do this earlier 🙁   let’s hope the repost will come in soon.

content-wise for the SDL posts, there were some exchange of ideas and a couple of questioning. more than the first round in fact. however, critical questioning that attempts to “dig deeper” into underlying meaning, assumptions, and conceptions are still in lacking. my hypotheses include (1) teachers are more comfortable with being friendly towards fellow teacher/participants; critical questioning steps outside such cultural norm, and (2) teachers are not familiar with the ‘expectation’ to pose questions to further clarify things that may not been spelt out clearly, yet. i’ve tried to post some questions to dig deeper. let’s see if the behaviour gets replicated.

the 3rd activity is the first of a series of weekly reflections. it’s meant to be completed two days ago. but to-date, there’s only 1 piece of “我觉得……” up. it’s posted by Sean, he who asked if “participants need to post reflections, do ‘teacher’ also need to also conduct reflection” during the first f2f session. looks like this could be taking up the 2nd position 😛    i’ve sent out another email reminder. and 3 participants already responded to my instruction to acknowledge receipt.

tmr marks the start of the 4th online activity — threads on CoL. but before that, i hope more weekly reflections will come in (:

reflection photoacknowledgement: Photo by marionberaudias