What did my learning process look like? When thinking about ways to describe my/this learning process, the obvious descriptive educational labels came to mind: self-directed, experiential, learner-centred, self-paced, authentic, heuristic. When I consulted an optional reading source, “Instructional Methods and Learning Styles”, from a previous MDDE class, author Stephen Petrina identified teaching models and methods whose attributes were characteristic of my educational undertaking:

· Discovery or Inquiry based learning

· Independent Study

· On-line instruction and learning

· Project based (Petrina, in press, pp. 130-131)

Petrina also references manners in which students prefer to learn, and describes:

“Haptic, Trial and Feedback or Judging, whereas students prefer doing tasks and hands-on applications followed by feedback. Prefer to make errors and build on trials and errors.” (Petrina, in press, p. 149)

It may very well be controversial to call this a style, but certainly this description, aptly characterizes how this project and the ensuing  learning process was for me.  Petrina also identifies a Relational preference, whereby students “prefer to link new material to what is already known, or unfamiliar tasks to familiar tasks. These students need time to discuss what is being learned prior to executing the tasks.” (Petrina, in press, p. 149) In my case, I needed to review or reassess what I already knew in advance of attempting the tasks. I interpret this preference, condition, or requirement, to be fairly closely akin to Mayer’s Pre-training Principle.

Absent of teacher presence, I chose a couple ‘constants’ to act as authority – the content in these resources was more stable, took longer to get through and gave more global depth (start to finish), yet at the same time did not necessarily drill down to answer specific questions. These resources provided me with the right amount of broad function complexity to give me a solid foundation. I just left their windows open. For instance I searched:

and found an instructional blog “How to start a WordPress Blog the RIGHT WAY in 7 Easy Steps” with an embedded tutorial video which I used to guide my discovery and blog creation process. It was one of the resources that was always open in a window on my computer. I would follow along and perform the activities in the WordPress platform, until I got stuck, and then I would rewind the video to the point in the subject matter where I was lacking in competency . If the problem area or question I was encountering was not addressed, then I would search either in the google Search engine, or in the WordPress Help search field. This instructional blog was linear in its delivery, constant and stable, but my other forays often diverted my attention to topics that were auxiliary rather than ancillary. It was hard at times to reign myself back in to the query at hand or to discern what truly were the appropriate next steps. The following is a list of the general topics I delved into in this SDL process:

A further look at the list of web based resources and instructional materials I referenced will offer a glimpse into how far afield, yet still tethered to the end goals, I roamed! (click here to find a pdf of my Reference page)

One step forward, two steps backwards, perhaps a short jaunt down the garden path which eventually connects back to taking one step forward . . . with the next step sideways looking out the window as I go, and then again one or two steps backwards, but eventually reaching what I think is the destination?

Measurement of Outcomes ⇒