I’m sorry that I’m a bit late. I already started the new week without analyzing the last one.
Review
So the last week felt kind of coming back to a regular working and studying week after the holidays. It was dominated by the final steps on an exercise for our Algorithm & Optimization course. After my regular work on Tuesday where I learnt a lot about how to use Grunt to automize the frontend building in web projects, we met for our project on Wednesday.
And there I made a nice experience: we did pair-programming in our small team of three people (backend-team). And we really were productive: we reached our goal to deliver a stubbed API to the mobile team and also did good effort on a nice documentation. That doesn’t sound stunning first but consider that we didn’t code really much until now – we were mainly focusing on researches on technologies and so on.
On Thursday, we had the interesting topics of Instrictuinal Technology and blended learning. I really appreciated the history of the used technology that showed me that the term “new media” is not really new because it is matching since the beginning of 20th century (and even until the French revolution I guess). Media used for didactics have quite changed on the one side and remained stable on the other side – like books and chalk boards.
I could see how time influenced things like the seating arrangement: nowadays, we have classrooms that allow group-working, in the 60s it was dominated by individual learning. So to sum it up, we need to research on the effects of new technologies onto didactis, and not only settle new technologies (because they are new).
I’ve also learned about the term blended learning. Looking back, the first time I experienced the combination of presence-learning and online course materials was back in my school time: in computer science. It was the first time I got in touch with moodle. We used the forums a lot – that was the first “asynchronous learning” that I experienced so far. And we had to hand in our exercises only. Later, blended learning escorted me until today – all my courses so far made use of the internet.
Goals for next week
The very last goal of mine was to find a solution for finding more time for each module. Well, I found one – I moved my Independent Courseworks to the next semester which shouldn’t be a problem because instead of having the last regular semester and than writing my master thesis I will split the one semester into two. This will allow me to concentrate more on my Independent Courseworks and the project II.
My goal for next week is to create a plan for the upcoming learning activties – the learning for the exams which will be mixed with the final exercises.