So one of my assignments this week, was to attend an Educational Tweetchat. As I reviewed the list of chats, they were almost all geared towards K-12th grade teachers. Being an instructional designer in corporate America for the past 20+ years, I had a difficult time choosing what might be applicable to me and had some doubts about the assignment.
The assignment, briefly, was to participate in a Tweetchat and blog about the experience. So I found a “Weekly Learning and Teaching in Higher Education” chat that said it was geared towards both teachers and students. As a student getting my Masters in adult learning and education, I thought this might be the one for me.
The first thing that struck me was that most of the participants were from the U.K. and a few shared photos of their cats. That in itself felt so cool to me: not only was I connecting with teachers from the UK, but they were sharing their pets. A personal touch is not a bad thing. I soon found that the questions, however, were a bit out of my area of expertise. For example, one question posed was “What advice might you give to someone considering presenting or publishing pedagogic research?” To be perfectly frank, I had to look up pedagogy. (This is only my second semester, after all.)
After the 3rd question, I realized I was not going to add to this conversation, but instead listen quietly and try to learn as much as I could. As the other participants spoke about the importance of sharing your findings through publishing and presenting, I realized that this is the whole point of Tweetchat: learning from each other and sharing what you know so that you don’t have to duplicate efforts.
Collaboration became a huge theme of the chat. Even though at first this chat seemed a bit beyond my understanding and experience, I learned a few important points. First, collaboration is a necessity, as I saw just from the Tweetchat alone. It still is an amazing concept to me, having previously not known these scheduled chats even existed. Now I realize that I can search for chats that are more specific to instructional design and my professional endeavors in order to enhance my skills and broaden my knowledge, and I plan to do so.
Another theme that also arose over and over again was blogging. If publishing is too difficult, too expensive, too time-consuming, just blog! So here I am, doing exactly what was suggested. I had no idea when I began this assignment that the assignment itself would give credence to me blogging about it.