Who is Skip Dodson?
Great session last night with the MSIT group. The class is Design and Development of Multimedia for Education and Training. They’re a sharp group, caught on quickly, and handled Manila glitches well (you know the story, one or two sites just acted up and who knows why). Plus, they were a fun group to teach! Dr. Calandra is great and emphasized to the class that they would be reading, discussing, and developing multimedia for LEARNING.
Weblogs were created and they’re ready to go. Dr. Calandra will be going over the specifics of what he wants them to do on their weblogs later so when they are up and going, hopefully, they will want to share what they are doing.
An interesting note to mention…….when they saw my weblog where I discussed the session and showed them comments from some of you I detected a little bit of alarm from them as to the openness of weblogs and the fact that people would be reading their weblogs. One of the comments - who is Skip Dodson? They wanted to know who these people were that were already making comments about their class. Now we all know that that is the best part of weblogs - the learning, the growing, the sharing, and the formation of a community of learners. We are so used to the back and forth comraderie. We don’t even think twice about it, we love it! However, when you are just learning, knowing that an audience is out there and so immediate can be intimidating. I spent some time talking with them on that aspect. Dr. Calandra understands the nature of weblogs and took time to further the discussion along that line.
Have any of you had this part come up? How do you alleviate the concerns? An important part of all this is for us to share in this area, too. We want to empower but not shut them down in these important beginning stages of learning the power of weblogs. I plan to continue to get feedback from them later on their thoughts, concerns, and ideas.
This group is a tech-savy group but those few moments of alarm coming from a tech-savy group gave me pause to re-think. It parallels with the students being afraid of putting their writing out there for others to see. No matter how you cut it, there is always that element of fear and apprehension. It’s not just fear of writing for others to see but a complicated mixture of learning something new, wrapping your brain around a new way of communicating, and then realizing at the same time that you may just be doing all of this for quite a large audience. Attention is being called to you by others - that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Emotions are so important in learning. Any comments?
An aside to Skip - hope you don’t mind my title but it just seemed to fit the session. 
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