Hi Everyone,
Happy Friday! I hope this note finds you having had a great week and looking forward to a weekend ahead that will be full of a mix of fall fun and LRNT 523 paper idea generation, pondering and maybe even sketching out of a detailed outline or rough draft ;)
Thanks so much for your well researched and presented Assignment 2 debates. I am working to post my feedback on your debates and the compilation of your peer assessment over the next few days and of course if you have any questions please don't hesitate to reach out.
Many thanks to all of you who were able to join in our guest speakers book club last evening. It was lovely to have Tanya Elias and Gary Rosborough join us and share their experiences with AR, VR and simluations as well as their thoughts on instructional design and the human in the loop with respect to AI. You can find the recording here.
As we look forward to the last two weeks of LRNT 523 (can you believe it??!!) I wanted to pass along a few other resources that past students have found useful in their writing.
Assignment time calculator – this one is good for at the front end of the assignment
Creativity in academic writing
I know you are working on your Activity 7 - blog posts about your A3 ideas and I can’t wait to see how those evolve into your final submissions. I did want to mention two things:
1. It is okay if there is some overlap in topics. If you see overlaps, use that as an opportunity to deepen your thinking based on what others are writing. Feel free to look up the references others are sharing or reach out to them to discuss.
2. What this assignment does ask is to say something about the future (of course), but equally importantly is to say something about the present. Our thoughts about the future are grounded on our present experiences, anxieties, hopes, and desires. In this way, when you're reading your peers' posts or thinking about the assignment, pause for a moment and think about what the writing says about education at the present time. For instance, there might be concerns of lack of affordability; marginalized spaces/places/people, generative AI, and climate change to name a few.
The blog post activity acts as a formative way to start the final assignment. As such, it offers a scaffold towards the assignment and avoid extraneous work at this stage. This is also the reason why Unit 3 is predominantly structured as a "work" unit, hopefully providing helpful breathing/thinking/writing space for you to devote to Assignment 3/
Happy writing and thanks again for all of your work and engagement in our course. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend ahead and as always, if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Ciao,
Elizabeth