Having considered the requirements of H808 I am in the fortunate position to have experience in the main applications that we will be using.
Discussion forums, as a an OU Tutor I have moderated my own conferences and indeed struggled to get activities going I anticipate a good level of activity in H808 purely because of the nature of this course.
Blogs, my blog has been up and running for a few years but not received a great deal of use but some housekeeping was performed to set it up for the course and my link was added to the course wiki.
Wikis not so strong here, happy with the content and of course familiar with Wikipedia but never really edited a wiki. I guess a key element is to prepare my entries and spell check content before adding. I have explored the course wiki. Pretty straight forward and I added my blog to the blog list.
Portfolio applications, I spent last year using PebblePad to compile my CPD evidence. Iinitially I thought I would use this again this year but I am slowly going off it. Discussion on this I am sure will follow but a big disadvantage is the way in which content is shared. I feel Google will be a much easy package to use and sharing is more straight forward. I have found an easy way to export in any case should I change my mind.
To this end I have completed some quick experimentation using Google Docs and Google Sites to start producing my portfolio of evidence.
I plan to develop my ideas and share with the rest of my fellow students as we start the course. I am confident I will reach a point where I can use these tools as I need, over the next eight weeks.
Three sources of support to help made available:
A map of the H808 virtual environment(in the Resources section of the H808 homepage). This will give an overview of the technical environment, and also some suggestions as to what you might focus on if you are a novice or an ‘old hand’ with these tools.
The various technical guides that you will find in the OU Computing Guide at http://www.open.ac.uk/computingguide/start.html.
The Technical and skills forum, where the online moderator will be available to answer questions and give advice, together with the more technically expert of the H808 student participants. Please make use of all these sources of help. If you hit a problem, don’t suffer in silence!
On reflection I found the map particularly useful even though I am an experienced user of the technology the amount of work was somewhat daunting the map made the technology clear and also gives a table of the core and supplementary tasks. Immediately printed and filed to use as a tick sheet as I progress through the course.
The technical guides are useful I have identified an area where I may need to perform some preparation work, that of academic writing. Its been a while since I wrote an essay let alone a piece of academic writing. I notice ref-works as well which might help so I have created an account to get things started.
As for the forums I have always been wary of spending too much time in them. They are useful and obviously a necessity for group-work but within a few days there were hundreds of unread messages. I decided to subscribe to my Tutors forums, this way I get an email each time an addition is made. Slight problem with this as it marks the messages as read which means when I look in the conference its not obvious what I need to read. I'll give it some time and review this I think.
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