The MDDE program played a significant role in bolstering my confidence while presenting my ideas to others. It provided me with a number of contexts in which I could practice my presentation skills to different audiences using a number of different technologies.

 For example, I only began making use of learning communities such as Me2U and BC Literacy Forum when I began my last core course, MDDE605. Before that, I limited my discussions and explorations of networks to the course forums within Moodle.

Then, at the end of the MDDE663 course, I needed to make use of the Me2U portfolio tool to create a presentation showcasing my learning in the independent seminar course. So I gained more experience collecting and presenting learning objects for others.

In July, 2009, I began using one of the most important tools for me, Posterous, enabling me to post using email a number of files as bundled learning objects. I began experimenting with the use of podcasting, and drew a lot of inspiration from Thomas Shephard's capstone project within Me2U on the use of mobile technologies. His tutorials on editing audio files using Audacity was pivotal, and came at the right time for me. This began the blurring of audiences of learning objects intended for the MDDE program at Athabasca. Overall, I have contributed 18 posts, and have 800 visitors to the site to date. This type of development of learning objects allows me to monitor which objects are more popular than others, and this has influenced which content is posted to Posterous. Combined content such as podcasts with documents and photos, for example, is quite popular, it seems, more than the basic text-only blog posts.

In addition, I used Elluminate to present my portfolio in MDDE663, and realized I still had (and still have) much to learn on how to use it effectively. This prompted me to use Elluminate to present ideas to literacy educators within the BC Literacy Forum. I prepared three presentations for that online community and I don't think it was very well-received, as I did not have much experience with the technology, and the community audience did not really identify with the topics.

A significant turning point for me was the presentation of the edublogging typology through the CIDER community. The Elluminate presentation was recorded. I felt it was quite successful, overall, as it gave me authentic experience with a large, diverse audience of educators. I learned a great deal from the event, such as the necessity to steel oneself for criticism and misinterpretation and tough questions and frank feedback. I will have an entirely different approach when presenting to a diverse audience in future.

In the past few months since completing the courses, I have become a member of SCOPE and CEET, but have not yet been very active with it. I have discontinued active participation in the BC Literacy Forum for now. I have been quite active within AU Landing since its launch in February 2010. In addition, I have been easing into the use of Desire2Learn and posting trial content.

Another tool I have tried using is PageFlakes, a series of applications that can be added to your customized web page. Still another tool I used about the same time as PageFlakes was Delicious, enabling me to create publicly shared annotated bookmarks. I think that these tools are great as a first step into managing your own widgets using a dashboard, and adding, annotating, and connecting your shared bookmarks. Without that first step, it would have been more challenging to get a feel for the use of the Dashboard within AU Landing, and to use the Bookmarks feature.

Thanks to blogging, I can subscribe to others' blogs and add RSSfeeds to my BlogLines account. I can tie all my other learning objects and files both within and outside of AU Landing to my blog thanks to the use of hyperlinks that are embedded within my blog posts.

I have an overload of resources within BlogLines that I have tapped into, and want to delve into at some point into the future. Time is at a premium, so I go back in and cull the list of blog posts, and edit/remove the RSS Feeds if they have not produced new content relevant to my interests within a couple months. It brings home the reality that readers of blogs will not keep subscribing if you don't have something they want to read. Like me, others have to be very selective of which feeds occupy their attention.