Oh, what a great first class...

All I can say is, "Oh, what a great first class." As many times we test chatted on Skype as a cadre for two nights straight to make sure all is going to be well for our first class with our professor, Murphy's Law generally comes in mind here in a humorous sense. Usually, Skype allows users to use a voice chat feature to verbally speak and hear from others clearly without any echos or disruptions. As a class, we learned that technology can have a "mind of its own." We expect it to work. When it doesn't, it can be a very interesting time trying to troubleshoot a problem(s) that occur. After 10-15 minutes of class, we put our minds together and figured out that the version numbers of Skype had to be 2.8 for MAC users and 4.1 for PC users.

To move things along, we had a text chat class that became the "brainchild" of cognition greatness and Texting Olympics to see who could type the fastest to get points across. It was a great experience. The topics of discussion were about 1) Distributed learning, 2) Distributed cognition/Cognition, and 3) the differences between them. The dialogue and questions asked by the class and our professor brought out some very interesting thoughts.

To reflect my thoughts in this blog about technology, it reminds me of the many of years that I have helped 1000s of customers resolve problems over the phone in the mid to late 90s as a support engineer. I would know what our technology was supposed to do but you wouldn't know what you would expect from the customers calling in with their problem(s). Some of the problems would be new without a known solution and others would be known issues with document solutions in the knowledge base. At the end of the day, it would be all worth it because you became more knowledgeable about issues and you were able to "ramp" up and collaborate with others about these issues to make everyone better prepared based on feedback given from other engineers.

My reflection about learning about the key concepts/topics talked about in class reminded me of my freshman year as an undergrad sitting in my Humanities class and my professor would question the class what was considered a competency and what was an assessment. This question would push me to read, read, and read more about what these were. Our professor was a bit challenging and I see this being very similar to what we will have to do as a Cadre to come up with our Action Research projects and do a lot of reading.

Again, I'm still excited about this class and the potential of greatness that will be shared to the world after this is all said and done. I'm reading the assigned reading again to make sure I am comprehending what has been documented for us to help us gather our thoughts about what action research and learning is all about.


Again, thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts.


Signing off...

JF