Something happened in my mind when CCK studies began. I have to reflect myself in order to participate .. I can’t write to colleagues  if I don’t recognize my own perspectives. What am I doing here actually?

I work in teacher education for adults coming from work life. We don’t have fulltime students in classrooms, they are working and they live in different parts of Finland. So we use virtual learning platforms and social media. Our pedagogy has been up-to-date those two decades I have been here. We have been pondering all learning theories all the time and “invented” personal learning plans in the year 1988 and the great impact of networks soon after that. Students are organized (or they organize themselves) to learning circles with peer feedback etc.)

I have developed my online teaching since the year 2002 and I prefer it. I have a blog in Finnish as an online teacher and I take part in Finnish social media community. I participated in CCK08 in order to follow global discussions about connectivism. And I am here again, I cannot stop coming :)

This time I try to be more conscious about my perspective: I am asking questions about the “best online pedagogy in the world” and I suppose something like that can be found in CCK09. My orientation is practical, theories are not enough.  In my previous post is dealt with conceptions about knowledge and epistemic styles. In practice you must have skills to all epistemic styles and the ability to choose and combine them:

So I intend to use 1) theoretical data, knowing via thought, 2) empirical facts, knowing via senses and 3) metaphorical, experiental, phenomenological data = knowing via intuition and insight. The criteria fo acceptance as knowledge are in same order:

  1. Ist it logical? Is it theoretically sound?
  2. Can it be experimentally proven?
  3. Does it fit to my experience? Does it feel right? Because I am an expert in online pedagogy I can trust my feelings about rightness. (But I had to read that first, I had forgotten it).

I am not studing only connectivism, I am studing all interesting up-to-date theories about learning and networking – and I am not the only one in the course who has this perspective. I added Frances in my blogroll and found Ning and Diigo groups with this broad perspective. So my next problem is to take time, decide where to participate.

Sun is shining just now, I have to go out, it is not allowed to sit all Sunday with my computer when beautiful autumn is outside.