"The alternative, a group of utterly disengaged and inexorably bored students was unacceptable."
In my own situation I had taken online courses, some with abysmal learning environments where many of the students, including myself, spent much of the time surfing the net during class. My passion for student engagement in my courses led me to believe that face-to-face was the best way to go. Content could certainly be learned in online environments, but the quality of the learning experience was sure to be marred by the lack of authenticity and notorious disengagement that I had felt myself as a student.
And so I plunged into the abyss of digitizing myself, leaving behind the safe secure shores of what I knew to an environment that was totally new and riddled with a minefield of mistakes waiting around every corner. I took courage in the fact that I had always trusted my intuition, and that learning would inevitably involve both risk and failure. Atkinson and Claxton (2000) refer to this as being “an intuitive practitioner; on the value of not always knowing what one is doing” (p 1).
Digital Moments / Oct, 2013 13