Connecting with #ccourses

by catherinecronin

I’m jumping into the Connected Courses adventure — here goes!! #ccourses popped onto my radar during the early summer, through Twitter and Flickr feeds (thanks @heloukee 🙂 ) The blog posts and videos and tweets which followed whetted my appetite further. I identify as an open educator and feel deeply not only about helping my students to develop their learning networks and networked learning skills, but about about sharing my ethos with students, and finding out about their practices, preferences, and values. That’s the heart of learning for me — whether it’s IT or poetry or history. I shared some of my thinking about this at #altc last week and here in Navigating the Marvellous, a summary of some thoughts about open learning and education, connecting across boundaries, and power relationships in education.

I participated in one of Howard Rheingold’s courses in 2011 (#mindamp). Howard, you modeled so much of what all of this is about, with humour and great insight. Thank you. I still share Howard’s adage with students whenever one of our learning experiments doesn’t go quite, er, as planned: “If you’re not falling off, you’re not on the edge.” I love that Howard addresses all of his students as Esteemed Co-learners.

Now for the confession. I’m been blogging for awhile here… but my blog is in need of some major rework. I’d like also to create a self-hosted WordPress blog. I’m immensely grateful for the advice and suggestions from Click, Link and Embed (priceless, guys!) and had hoped to get down to this during this pre-course week, but start-of-semester pressures mean that’s not been possible. So I’m taking a deep breath and just getting started in #ccourses with my blog as is — but stating my intention to get under the hood of my blog later during #ccourses.

So, thanks to you all — organisers, participants, readers of this post — for bringing #ccourses to life. I’m heading in with open mind and open heart… see you there 🙂

Image: Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0 catherinecronin