I am going to reference a post here from another student, Katherine Firth, because the video came from here: http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/kfirth/2015/01/19/bayne-2015/. I did consider posting this as a comment, but it didn’t really follow the ongoing conversation.
Anyway, this was a new video to me, and gave me food for thought. It highlighted, for me, the importance of the social element in learning. How the teacher not only imparts knowledge to their students, but also attempts to “inspire, challenge and excite their student to want to learn.” And how we learn as a group, not as individuals.
So some observations about how I feel about this module:
I miss having forums in a course. If I want to say something that is off-topic but related, I can start a new thread, or just reply, and the replies can branch but still be followed. Not possible here in a linear commenting interaction. Each conversation is discrete; it’s very hard to link conversations together.
I miss hearing the voice of the tutors. I know they are active in each person’s lifestream but I have to look for them. It’s disjointed, like an unstarted jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces are there but I haven’t worked out how to put them together to see the whole picture.
I don’t feel as connected to the other students and the lecturers as I did in other modules.
On the positive side I am enjoying the lifestreaming; it’s new and I love having the finished blog pages with all of my thoughts and research together in one place. And I am starting to find new ways to listen to everyone – e.g. following the ‘recent comments’ block on the main course page. I also need to start using Twitter to hold conversations.
Overall, I like it. It’s just going to take me a while to get used to the new style of interaction.
Hi Jeannine, I understand what you mean about the disjointed nature of the course. I’ve found the weekly summaries useful to weave together the random posts in my lifestream and the Twitter feed is helping me feel more connected to everyone. I’ve been reflecting on the fluidity of the course in the last few days and the best metaphor I can think of is that it feels like a symphony rather than a soundtrack (in the sense of a continuous piece of music rather than separate songs). The other analogy that came to mind was a book without chapters and punctuation like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – hard to get used to initially but once you get into it you really enjoy the style of writing
Hi Clare, I agree with your book analogy. I haven’t read The Road but I have read some ebooks that have lost part of the formatting in the conversion process and they are difficult to follow. It is exactly that type of feeling that I am experiencing. It also helps to know I’m not the only one
And I really must do more with Twitter. Thanks for the reply 
Hi Jin – I understand – this format can feel quite ‘rudderless’ and fragmented but as you say it has different pleasures from the more discussion-board oriented courses. I enjoy both, but I find the tapestry-like nature of this design on balance more enjoyable. I think it’s to do with feeling you can dip into and out of a stream of ideas: in this sense it is often less pressured than discussion-board courses which can feel like you are always frantically swimming to try to stay afloat .
I really like Clare’s metaphor of a symphony – all the various elements do seem to build to make the course space. For me that’s something quite different from other course designs in which the Moodle space is more of a pre-defined container within which stuff happens.