I have had the chance to talk about this INTRO course many times with my classmates, and it was interesting to listen to different voices. One of the things I love the most of this Master’s Programme is how different are the people in it: the class is, in fact, a mix of different ages, experiences, competences and expectations, and everyone comes a different background; it is very difficult to find two students who share the same background story. So I could say, yes: the first thing I learned to do is to deal with difference. I love sharing my experiences, and I picture myself as a very shy person, but I learned to expose my ideas and my views, without thinking too much if they were wether right or wrong, both with my classmates and during class teaching. My academic background is strictly traditional, with teachers/lecturers walking on the stage, talking about the topics of the lectures, leave almost no space to questions, comments or discussions, and leave the class; in this course, I experienced the freedom of speaking, building a brand new confidence, without having problems to grab the Catch Box and say my own opinion. And as much as I learned to express my own opinion, I learned to listen to others’, learning from them, learning to integrate their experience and views with mine, in what resembles a chemical reaction which had learning something new as outcome.
As a part of the experience in my INTRO course, there is also the contact with new teaching methods; “new” at least for me. As I wrote earlier, I come from an old fashioned way of experiencing lectures, where all I could do was to take notes in class and study huge books at home, so here is why when the lectures mentioned “jigsaw method”, “pecha kucha”, “MOOC” and other methods, I felt quite lost. Classes were well organized and well timed, lectures were always interesting and left room for discussions, especially when we had the chance to have guest lecturers. The most fascinating part. in my opinion, was the one when us students were involved in a more active way, which is something that my educational journey has always lacked of. I have learned the meaning of the words I mentioned earlier, for example, and used those ways of teaching to actually learn something. Talking about the jigsaw method, here in this course I had the very first contact with it. And I liked it. It was interesting to know more about it and actually put it into action. Getting to know what a pecha kucha is, a presentation made of 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide available, and being able to produce one together with a classmate, helped me on many levels. First of all, it taught me how to collaborate with a peer instead of simply working alone on a particular subject, as coordination in this kind of presentation is really important; secondly, it stimulated me to become curious about the topic I had to develop; lastly, not to underestimate, it gave me the opportunity to become familiar again with Power Point, as this type of presentation have not been usual in my academic background.
The key concept of this Master’s Programme is “collaboration”, as I could understand from the early information seeking before applying to it and from my Skype interview back in April 2015, and this course is no different from the whole programme. In this INTRO course I learned the basics of collaborative learning: what it is, what are its pros and cons, how to actively put it into action. I’ve learned that “collaborative learning” does not mean just “learning together” as the name suggests at a first glance: it involves a deeper level of collaboration, which goes beyond the previous idea I had. During our jigsaw sessions we were given a different reading for every group member, one week to read it and to discuss about it in the “expert groups” first, and then talk about them with our groupmates. Surprisingly, it’s during these jigsaw meetings that I felt I learned the most; I first learned a lot thanks to the articles I had to read, but mostly from the experts meetings, while sharing what I understood from the paper with my peers, and from the discussion in the home group. It has been fascinating to have a first contact with old and new learning theories, comparing them with each other and get to know how people actually learn. At the end of every session, in our home teams, we had to discuss about each article and produce a mind map in order to give a synoptic view of what we learned; this stage taught me how to learn from the others by comparing our limited knowledge (“limited” to just one article), and build together a complete one, and put it on paper or on a tablet screen. This final stage of the sessions were quite important to me, as I effectively felt responsible for the group’s successful outcome, and I realized how my knowledge of a particular topic could be exposed and compared to others’ previous one. According to the transfert theory, to quote a theory I studied in one of my readings, I feel that having become able to produce mindmaps could be applied to my future studies in an effective way.
Part of the INTRO experience was a weekly ICT workshop, that helped me to get to know the potential of technology in class. By completing simple tasks, I learned ho technology can be used effectively in a learning environment, and how to create educational content with programmes I never heard of before. The last class was particulary useful, as we got to know the potential of the class we had most of the classes, in a fun, entertaining and practical way. This class, in particular, gave me the idea that technology is not just entertaining, but it is going to be crucial in the development of learning sciences.
In my first post, I didn’t write much about my idea of how people learn, because my idea was very basic. I had experienced teaching just as a student and as a volunteer teacher in my spare time, but I never stopped for a second to think about the concept of learning. I had just seen learning as something that happens by experience, or via direct instruction, in a very shortsighted way of thinking, so writing about it was quite difficult; only now I know how deep is the idea of how people learn. Comparing how much I learned in less than two months with the little knowledge I had surprises me, especially thinking about how I built this knowledge: with what it seemed to me a very peculiar way of teaching, way different than what I have always been used to.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I had the possibility to compare my classmates opinion on this INTRO course: many claim to have learned not so much, for many it was just a “more of the same”, but for many, like ma, it was a very useful first sight of what education really is about. My background is based on communication and language studies (more oriented towards linguistics than foreign languages), with minor studies in psycology and literature, but I’ve never had a real introduction to learning and to what it actually means. During my volunteering, I tried to make the “impression” of some of the teachers who left me a positive memory, trying to prepare my classes in order to make them look appealing and entertaining, without any preparation for such a task. I know this is just an INTRO course, but I feel like I have learned a lot already, and I look forward to know “what is next”.
In conclusion, I think that this INTRO course has been important in my journey in this Master’s, in order to have a better knowledge of the current state of ICT use in schools, learning theories linked to it and potential. No I feel ready to start learning more and on a deeper, more complex level on the subject.
P.S. Here is a comparison between our (my group, Me, Adelina, Elena and Merlin, nicknamed “The Butterflies” after our first drawing) initial idea of learning and the final one. I had the pleasure to work with a very talented, creative team, in which everyone gave a part of their knowledge and previous experiences in every meeting and created something beautiful every time. The first work and the last one don’t differ too much, but while drawing the latter one we had a clear idea of what learning is and how technology is important to trigger it.
Alex in Oulu 