Summary of week 1

Hello everyone

Well, I don't know where the first week of FO2011 went, but here we are about to go into our second week.

Blogs and contact details
This week has been hectic with everyone getting their blogs set up and putting their contact details on the course wiki. If you are a little late to the course, check out the course schedule and follow the instructions for 7th March - here is the link to Pdf copy of the course outline which includes a study timeline.

Tips
We had the first of our live meetings and enjoyed getting to know each other a little better. We were joined by several participants of FO2010 and they shared a few tips for getting the most out of the course:

• Connect with each other...share resources, information and support. We are our own best learning resources.
  
• Keep up to date with blogging. Connect with others by leaving comments on their blogs and joining conversations.
• Have a go...don't be afraid to 'play' with the technology....make the most of the course as a safe place to experiment and learn about technology.
  

Learning and chaos
We were thrilled to be joined by Nancy White on our Friday meeting - Nancy is an expert online facilitator and this course uses a lot of her research and material. Nancy's main comment was that at first we may feel a great sense of chaos as we sort ourselves out...work out how the technology works...and find out the best way of connecting with each other. But Nancy reassured us that out of the chaos will come learning.

Meeting recording
For those of you who couldn't make it to either of this week's live meetings, here is the recording of Friday's meeting:

• http://tinyurl.com/4np9s7c

We ran out of time, so next week we plan to talk about how you can easily follow other participants' blogs using tools such as Google Reader. Another way of following blogs is using Pageflakes - Chris has set up a Pageflakes page for FO2011.

My tip
In terms of following and connecting with people, I do not expect you to network with everyone on the course. What you may be better off doing is deciding to focus on a smaller number of people, making sure you read their blog posts and regularly leave comments. Whilst it is natural to network with people that you have things in common with, it's also fun to connect with people who walk different paths to you.

Look forward to catching up with you next week. Sarah :)