Day 1 of Connecting it all Up. …and how did it go??
It was absolutely liberating.
Photo CC licensed. http://bit.ly/YAyfSs (I’ll learn how to cite these cleverly soon…)
For the first sessions in my different lectures today I got the students to find all the course materials in their various online locations… and start tweeting! This was a leaf out of the #Phonar book, where @Jonathan_Worth has his students tweet all of their notes- and then I borrowed another idea from @mcdanger and asked the students how they might want the physical space to suit their learning…. replies via twitter. (you can see the fun in this already) and the consensus was:
… for the students who jumped in the beanbags are on order! There was another lecturer, Clive Holtham who told me about his idea of providing comfy sofas as ‘priority seating’. I wonder if it will inspire a few more to get involved next week…
The second class was #MUS654 and this first week’s content and tasks went live. That course is one I hope others from the world wide interwebs will join in with us and grow the learning…
From my point of view it was absolutely liberating. Imagine a lovely circular room with two grand pianos and not a whiteboard in sight, but tablets and phones at the ready… and plenty of smiles 🙂
As a Music Department we have a longstanding policy that makes us pretty much paperless, and that includes no photocopying privileges. WHY??? Well, copyright of course! Music is either purchased or legally downloaded, and when downloaded, it needs to go through the reprographics people, as there is clever software that prevents students from printing musical scores, and gives them a load of blank pages. We’ve been paperless for years, and it has meant that online has become home more and more….
For my two classes today it was a soft entry to the big wide world, but between the groups there was a lot of enthusiasm with a pinch of genuine trepidation, but overall a sense of community and fun that began to emerge and that gave me a lot of hope!
Let’s see where we go with this!
#CCourses are here to stay
