Didaktics of media: Learning Environment – Recap

This will be the last article in this category, as the course nears its end. I will have a short recap on my experience in this course and how it changed my learning behavior. This is the logical follow up to my post Learning Environment: Status Quo.

Experience in this course

This course differs from all my other courses because this is the first course I took outside my “normal” curriculum. So all fellow students had a different background than me, probably already knew the professor etc.

Yet the course was one of the best I had in University. I think I learned a lot in this course and had contact and insight to many topics which I probably would never had deemed worth investigating. Although the professor is strict and the workload is not deniable, I am happy I chose this course.

Methods

In the mentioned article I listed five methods I use when learning:

  1. Information consumption
  2. Training
  3. Discussion
  4. Information curation
  5. Reflection

1 - Information consumption

I still rely heavily on my ability to consume and process an huge amount of information. So no changes here.

2 - Training

As I mentioned in the linked post, doing is better than listening. In the time of the course I hadn’t had that much training (of any kind, not even my martial art). So I hesitate to write something about this part. The only thing I can think of is the third learning unit (the MOOC), where I had a lot of hands on work to do (see my result here: Instagram)

3 - Discussion

As in the section before, not that much changed here: I went to some meetups and also had good high quality discussions with colleagues. But nothing drastically differed by participating the course.

4 - Information curation

Not that much changed here as well: Only 26 upvotes on good questions or answers on Stackoverflow.com for example.

5 - Reflection

Of the five sections, the “Reflection” section is the one with the most changes, I would think. I wrote 17 posts for this course alone, that’s more than for all other topics in that time span. It feels good to recapitulate the learned topics and to put whole sentences on the blog.

Tools

The tools section changed as well. For example I reduced my amount of Feedly and Facebook to 30 minutes a day (StayFocusd for Chrome). The other mentioned tools didn’t change that much. I blogged a little bit more than usual (which is good) and used Stackoverflow and Evernote a bit less.

Something I did add to my toolbox (based on this course) is Pluralsight, a very good training site. I really recommend is warmly. Something I also use since the course is DuoLingo, mostly on my mobile phone. Currently I learn Swedish with DuoLingo and binge watch every thing actor model related on Plurasight.