Have you ever been pregnant? When you are, everyone else is pregnant too. Amazing. 

Ever done a MOOC? The whole world seems to be doing one. In fact, everyone’s online, isn’t that the only way we all want to learn now?

I’m here to find out how we learn by doing it this way. I just have to remember that it’s not a reality for everyone…yet!!

I’m part of group 2 of the EDCMOOC foundation quadblogging brigade. Very sensible, beginning 7 days before Christmas. Luckily I have decided on a non consumeristic approach so the fact that I have not bought any presents to date shouldn’t pose a problem for combining blogging with (lack of) preparation this year!

So that in mind, hi to Nigel, Willa and Kelcy, my fellow first time quadbloggers.

I live in Australia (born in Scotland, Aussie accent), about 100km south west of Sydney in a picturesque district called the Southern Highlands. Cool climate, European gardens, slow life, rural, conservative, safe. In another life, I was a molecular biologist, then a restaurateur for a short while before my husband embarked on a 16 year career in the media (in which I played a major supporting but backstage role) which led to all things TV, publishing, teaching, travel, marketing and the superficial fluff that comes with the territory. 

A determination to head back to academic life led me to Integrated Human Studies and the decision to do a PhD, something I almost embarked on before changing tack all those years ago. 

I am now part of a teaching team of 3: Prof. Neville Bruce, Mark Paynter (fellow PhD candidate) and myself, co-ordinating the only fully online course at the University of Western Australia, in which a bit like Coursera courses, we have graduate students from all over the world drawn from a wide range of professions: from medico’s to barristers, to professors at other institutions, dancers, artists, scientists, engineers, film producers, town planners… you name it. And in keeping with the whole online experience where distance exists only in the mind, I live on the other side of the continent to Neville, (a 5 hour flight to Perth) and Mark lives a 5 hour drive south of Perth. We’ve all met on more than one occasion, but that seems immaterial. We are in daily contact with each other and with our highly engaged student community.

So, I am educating the well educated, and educating myself at the same time, social constructivism in action.

I have done one MOOC, Introduction to Sustainability, which I did in tandem with a friend from ANU, and we both loved. It filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge for the content I am teaching in IHS, and gave me a student perspective of the MOOC experience. EDC is my second MOOC, and I’m not sure if it because I want to wallpaper my office with coursera certificates or whether I just love the brain stimulation, but I’ve enrolled in several more for 2013. Who needs a PhD anyhow…

Like most of us off and running way ahead of time, the sharing of ideas, resources and the whole social experience is giving me a lot of food for thought. My blog is initially a learning journal, now morphing into a quadblogging tool and eventually whatever it is required to be after January 28. 

I have several wordpress sites, so thought I’d try blogger this time. It’s a little cluttered and homely. I prefer the sleek lines of most wordpress sites and not really drawn to blogger, not even my own, and I keep changing the theme, hoping for a miracle. But still boring. 

So as an introductory first quadblog, I hope this gives you guys an idea of my eLearning background. In earlier posts, maybe the storify one, there are links to flickr, other blogs and links if you are interested.

NB: I wanted to comment on this post but it won’t let me. So… fellow quadbloggers, I’ve just read it the next morning, with a critical eye. I would tell my own students, what was the point of this post? Did the introduction engage the reader to keep going? Did it have a conclusion? By my own writing criteria, this is a pretty poor effort! I never returned to the original concept.