Everybody's Different...

During our class tonight, I really noticed how everyone can hear the same thing and come up with a completely different understanding of what they heard.  We all bring our own filters to the table.  People who were familiar with Learning Theory Families knew certain things and the rest of the class played catch up.  The ones who understood the way the product could look or what it should represent, didn't necessarily understand the content.  THANK GOODNESS we had each other.  We all come from different backgrounds and don't all have the same starting point.
  After examining some of the products, I knew we shouldn't have second-guessed our inclination to have some text in the product.  I felt like the link we created for the two families was not clear. Halfway through the exercise- I realized someone else had joined our team, so that was a surprise.  When I tried to load Ryan's PowerPoint, it fragged my macbook and I had to switch to another macbook. I was lucky I had another on hand.  Whew!   I may have to re-download the Office for Mac software because I think my PowerPoint is corrupted.  I have had trouble a few times with it and I do not have time for that in this class.  It just won't do if my macbook freezes up when I open a PowerPoint.  Half the time we are opening PowerPoints.

Our Class- as different as the two sides of the brain

 I was unaware that we could have two wimba rooms, though we can't be in both at the same time.  If we can I haven't figured our how to do it.  I truly enjoyed working with new people tonight. Even though we each brought different understanding to the communal table, I feel like we worked well as a team.  We LEARNED as a team, made decisions as a team, what emerged was our shared understanding or misunderstanding, which is an example of George Siemen's connectivism. Here is a link to a nice Connectivism glossary.

I love pot luck suppers because you never know what you are going to get, and there is always the potential to find a new dish to enjoy.  In the case of this class, the mixture of students who are familiar with each other and the students who are fresh to the group are going to make this an interesting and rewarding semester.  The scavenger hunt activity was fun and we were so careful to leave breadcrumbs.  Consequently, when we opened another group's hunt, we were laughing because they left just the bare bones for clues, and we still found what we needed to find.  It goes to show that one method can be just as right as another, or there is MORE than one way to skin a cat.  I wonder who came up with that saying? Who wanted to skin a cat anyway?