As a learner, I want to engage, I want to comment. There is no reason, no value (in my mind) to comment, just to comment, or because it’s a requirement. But comments are not the same thing as conversations. This is my first blog, and my first real blog post was for ET MOOC. In that respect, my experience with commenting has been simple: I post, someone comments, I respond. End of transaction. I don’t know if that’s conducive to learning. I know that I have been offered much food for thought in the few comments that I’ve received, but that’s not the same thing as having “helped my learning.”

I see what appears to be some very good conversations going on. And that’s great. But we all can’t achieve those same things. Maybe some of us don’t ask the right questions. Maybe some of us don’t offer anything provocative. Maybe some of us don’t provide the space necessary for online engagement. Maybe some of us don’t comment enough. Maybe some of us just overthink commenting. But I do want to make a case for moderation, as well. For some, a course like this can be a life-changing experience, and commenting is a large part of that experience. For others, it will be a poor or overwhelming experience. And for still others, and I would hazard to say the majority, a course like this will be a good experience, if more than a bit taxing. But it will ONLY be a good experience. And that’s OK. Not everything has to be GREAT. Not everything has to be exceptional. A lot of small steps can lead to an incredible journey. But it doesn’t have to happen all at once, or in six weeks, or in one course. 

As I was thinking about this post, Alexis Goldstein (of OWS and Strike Debt) was tweeting yesterday morning about The Administration of Fear by Paul Virilio, and the changing definition of progress, the propaganda that makes us perpetually occupied by it, and that it is too often only defined by “a desperate effort to stay in the race.” 

I want my learning to be part of my every day. I want my learning to be receptive. I want my learning to be natural. To achieve this, good learning, for me, takes time and energy. While some might see “natural” and “time and energy” as having little relationship, I offer this analogy: I played baseball in college (even playing two summers in Edmonton as an “American” recruit), and as a hitter people told me often that I had a “natural” swing. But my “natural” swing only came from the tens of thousands of swings that came before it, from the hard work. Too often, my “learning” does not feel natural, it just feels like hard work. And that’s good. Maybe some day my learning will be natural.

ET MOOC is a good learning experience because it introduces me to new tools and new ideas, all while giving me an opportunity (permission) to explore and practice (practice, practice). But any course, especially a cMOOC like this one, has a tendency to create an unnatural environment, primarily because of its intensity and its compression. And this is what makes commenting so hard for me in this context. Because of the intensity, I am prompted and prodded, pushed and poked in all kinds of interesting ways, and I want to comment every time. But this is really a new experience for me. Someone like Sue Waters or Alec Couros are “naturals” because they have put in the time and effort, developed the skills and the tools for dealing with this kind of intensity. It has become a part of their every day. While they have provided a wealth of valuable support and strategies for dealing with it, as have so many others in this course, their ability to engage and interact (comment), from my perspective, is clearly exceptional.

So I’m still learning how to comment, when to comment, what to comment, and where to comment. I’m comfortable with why I comment, but I’m still thinking about the ways that I will incorporate commenting into my every day.

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If you’ve made it this far, I want to offer one more thing (maybe this should be a separate post, but I’ll keep it brief): From my previous experience with corpus linguistics and a more recent interest in learning analytics, I’d be interested in analyzing the texts from ET MOOC posts and comments to glean insights into the kinds of language that a writer might use to promote greater interactivity, more comments, etc. I’m quite certain this kind of work has been done before, so would be interested if anyone knows of sources they might point me to. Or if anyone is interested in pursuing this line of inquiry, I would love to begin a conversation.