Packing your bags
My discipline is the facilitation of online learning. Obviously that means that a lot of educational technology is involved. I find that a misunderstood concept is that we should either choose the tools we use, or simply accept the tools that we’re handed by the institution, and build our learning strategies from there. What tends to be far more effective is to identify the pedagogical strategy that you feel would be most effective for what you are tasked with teaching, whether it’s a behaviourist, objectivist, constructivist, cognitivist or connectivist approach, and work towards choosing the tools that would fit best with those strategies only after those things are identified. I think an analogy that might work is to pack your bags and book your plane tickets as the first step of a journey that you do not yet know where it is going. Sure it may be a great strategy if you happen to pack your swim trunks and the destination is Cuba. But what if where you need to get to is in the middle of the woods just outside the town you live in? Now those swim shorts aren’t helping you out in the snow and the plane tickets may help as expensive kindling for the fire you need to keep you warm. Figuring out your destination and how you want to get there first would be a much better approach.
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Example for "Packing your bags":
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17TA3jNTx4SDL8xYqI8SKL7ZAlyLXvfmAx0j44JiLqcE/edit#heading=h.mpylr1gah0dj
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