It’s All Coming Together This Week, Isn’t It?

As I worked my way through this week to finish up my PLN paper, a quick realization hit me that what we had done in this course for the past few weeks are still pretty vivid in my mind, and perhaps a little more surreal than I had anticipated the learning experience to be. I had similarly completed a 6-week course earlier in the summer (also by Vanessa), but nothing seems like this course in terms of intensity and immersion level. Perhaps it is a case of DOING A LOT in a 6-week period, or a case of back-to-back summer courses, or the way the course is structured which requires us to explore, probe, experiment and report what we have found. Nevertheless, I believe that the consensus in the class is that this experience is refreshing, we had a lot of fun along the way, and we would definitely not want it any other ways.

As I start to recollect what I have learned in order to describe my preferred PLN, another insight that I derived is that you will never know what you can possibly do, or use something to your advantage, until you personally try it. I was indeed pleasantly surprised throughout the course that most of the social media tools that we were exposed to were very interesting and relatively easy to use, and having occupied a huge chunk of my time in the past few weeks, I am certain that some of them would have big parts to play in my life from this point onwards, whether it is as part of my PLN, or as part of an instructional design in my professional life in the near future, or just simply as social media tools that I could use to regulate and enrich my life. Hence, I am pretty glad that I have taken this course, and would definitely cherish my learning experience from the last 6 weeks!