Minor Glitches not hurdles
What I thought were hurdles turned out to be just minor glitches. I think I had over-reacted.
The course is evolving well. Familiarization with web resources is happening the right way. I just have to grapple a little with them till I get them right. There is no escape, no short cut, no leaning on anyone to physically help me out. And that is how it should be. And yet help is available just an email away. One message to the Tutor and instructions follow to make me solve my problems myself. Learner autonomy, self-reliance, and the teacher as a facilitator, a guide is truly the order of the day.
I am impressed by the web tool ‘Nicenet.com’. It indeed creates a virtual classroom with the Tutor, the peer group, all the resources of knowledge and the many tools at my disposal to make learning happen. All I need is to be fairly competent in using language (because the course is part of higher education program) and possess basic computer skills to be able to learn the more advance level skills. I need plenty of time as well and the motivation to want to learn new things and to use them. I am glad all that is in place in my case.
This course is opening the windows of my mind stimulating me to throw open training opportunities to thousands of teachers in India. Blogging can be a nice way of providing tremendous amount of language inputs to trainees. Yes, they must have internet resources in place.
I am overwhelmed at the moment by the number of websites, so very specialized, and the amount of data they can supply. Gonzalo says he uses /delicious/ to organize data for quick retrieval. I am happy to see it is part of our syllabus. I can’t wait to use all these websites. One lifetime is too short to make use of the resources available to us.
I need to still ask Robert about one particular problem I am facing:
(i) why can’t I see the messages I post on people’s blogs? Similarly, I can see followers on my blog but I can’t find any messages there. Is it that no one has posted comments there so far? The Dash Board says I still don't have a 'public google profile'. Doesn’t look like.
Well it can wait until next week... tomorrow.
