Sylvia Currie

I've been keeping my eye on this LAK11 topic for some time, so I feel very fortunate to be helping out as one of the facilitators. There's no better way to learn than to take on a role where you really need to pay attention! :-)

I work from my home office in Lac Le Jeune, British Columbia -- high enough in the mountains that we spend a fair amount of time feeding the wood stove and shoveling snow. For the past 16 years I've been involved in all sorts of interesting projects related to online communities and teaching and learning online.

For the past 6 years I've been the community steward for SCoPE (where you are now) which is an international community hosted by BCcampus. Also in my role of client services manager for BCcampus, I support leaders of several Communities of Practice, and coordinate professional learning opportunities in British Columbia, all related to teaching and learning, and connecting across disciplines in higher education. In my work the topic of analytics comes up frequently, both in formal an informal learning contexts, so I look forward to the next 6 weeks and learning from all of you.

For this course to be successful I'd like to see participants asking a lot of questions...because there are a lot of questions to ask about this topic!

Motivation and Adult Learning has been an interesting topic, and one that hasn't come up often in SCoPE. Firat, we really appreciate that you suggested it and volunteered to facilitate. Thanks so much! And thanks to everyone who participated.

I spent some time reviewing the discussion and pulling out pieces that relate to what motivation means to us, motivational factors, and your ideas for promoting motivation. I also tagged an emergent theme on measuring motivation. The links are all in the seminar wiki.

This process of reviewing, reflecting, tagging, and summarizing is something that I enjoy doing very much. I'm always amazed at just how much I miss during a seminar. As SCoPE community steward, usually by the time a seminar is underway I'm off planning the next one. Alas, it's that time issue that was raised more than once during our discussion. :-)

But something that has become apparent for me during this seminar is that I am motivated to take the time to reflect and openly summarize because I feel (I hope!) I am giving back to the community. One nice thing about using the annotation tool to summarize is that it can be a distributed task, and for sure what I chose to highlight is going to be different from what bounces out at you. (If, as you comb through the forum posts, you see items you would like to tag to add to the summary please do! Check into the Marginalia Sandbox for demos on using the annotation tool.) So the whole conversation around participating for yourself, and participating in the collective, really hit home for me.

When I am in a facilitator role I tend to highlight pieces as I go along as a way to draw attention to points to bring forward, or to identify new topics, etc. As Nicholas Bowskill expanded on in this seminar:

to do it properly you really have to settle and think about what lies behind different messages. That can mean thinking about the emotional state - the feelings - behind messages as well as the content. It can also mean thinking about the implications of any reply too.

All of this got me thinking about individual effort, roles, and how that all relates to motivation. The topic is endless, isn't it? But thankfully that's what we're all here for -- to continue to explore our emerging questions! So I'll stop my rather personal, open reflection here and look to the future...

We have a few seminars in the planning stages for 2011. Check 'upcoming seminars' for to keep up-to-date and what and when. If you have ideas for seminar topics and/or wish to facilitate a seminar please get in touch!

We are kicking off the new year with something a little different -- an open, online course! Learning and Knowledge Analytics runs January 10 - February 20, 2011. The asynchronous forum (Moodle) portion of the course will be hosted here in SCoPE. Sign up for the course by joining the Google Group (or subscribe to it via RSS to stay in the loop). Hope to see you there!

Thanks again everyone, and see you in 2011!

Sylvia Currie
scurrie@bccampus.ca
+1 250-318-2907

We had 26+ participants in our December 7, 2010 session "Taking Education into OERbit" with Paul Stacey. Some gathered at their own institutions and participated as groups, which is a great way to engage in these sessions.

We can use this forum to extend the discussion we began in our Elluminate web conference, so feel free to post your questions and resources here.

For those of you who travelled from outside of the lower mainland to participate in the Learn Together Collaboratory -- Next Steps event, you can download the travel expense claim form here:
http://www.sfu.ca/finance/uploads/page/19/trclaimNonEmployeesOnly.xls

Instructions and rates are on page 3 of the form.

Remember to include original receipts, and SIGN the form before mailing it to:
Christy Foote BCcampus
555 Seymour Street, Suite 200
Vancouver, British Columbia
V6B 3H6

The purpose of this forum is to bring together everyone involved in the next phase of design and development for the Learn Together Collaboratory. At this point we have decisions to make about how to proceed, and in keeping with our guiding principles, the process should be inclusive and provide a means for everyone at all institutions to participate.

So let's get started! Tell everyone how you are involved, or want to be involved. Post your notes, ask questions, make suggestions...