Critical Inquiry Reflection
It’s an interesting, albeit time-consuming, task to go through all my posts to follow the process of critical inquiry in which the course engaged me. I can see that I was engaged in each of the phases of the process but that from my perspective I did a lot of exploration and integration and was prompted to reach resolution which I believe I did in some areas.
As a newcomer to online teaching and learning, I recognize that I was very interested in exploring the possibilities offered by online education and I believe I have accomplished that. I also attempted to translate existing exercises and to generate new ideas that may work in non-face-to-face teaching. Really, only time will tell if that will happen. I’m not sure that I had any dilemmas to resolve but my questions and curiosity about how to make online learning engaging and create a connection with students seems more possible now, based on what I’ve done and read in this course.
I appreciated the combination of activities and reflection that was a part of the course and believe that it encouraged engagement in the entire inquiry process. I think the process is duplicatable with my students, especially given that I have this model to reflect on and use as a foundation.
As far as working in WordPress goes, I’m not convinced that it added to my reflective learning experience. I felt a little like I was learning the platform and then fitting the assignments in. As someone who started working with computers in the 1990’s, I’m very familiar with file structure hierarchies and can group files and documents clearly and appropriately for ease of access. I appreciate the opportunity to learn how to use WordPress but could just have easily have submitted documents with my thoughts and read others. Seeing others’ work was interesting and helpful for a number of the posts for which I was a bit uncertain but…I probably could have figured things out on my own. It was interesting to see others’ perspectives which varied a little (maybe due to fields of interest?).
