The next artifact, MDDE613: Reframing Humanism, explores the significance of humanism in teaching and learning, and critically evaluated the central arguments for applying humanist theory to current pedagogy. The paper is significant in that it lays the foundation for my own perspective on teaching. I concluded that educators have the responsibility to assist adult learners to reflect on the manner in which values, beliefs, and behaviors previously deemed unchallengeable can be critically analyzed (Brookfield, 1985). For me, this paper mirrors the turmoil I experienced in my professional context. I had been reflecting on questions concerning my own assumptions towards self-directed adult literacy learners engaged in self-paced courses. I needed a means to clarify my own philosophical position regarding the responsibilities I have towards my learners, and what responsibilities they have for themselves. This paper discussed issues such as bounded autonomy, constraints on personal choice, and self-making. These same issues would continue to be a central theme for me, contributing to my decision to pursue independent study. The artefact MDDE613: Reframing Humanism also showcases a discussion of my personal perspective and epistemological orientation for the teaching – learning process, and demonstrated that I can recognize a number of problems, define them, analyze them and evaluate them. The paper also demonstrated I made reasoned arguments, provided support for those arguments, and made suggestions for teaching practice from a humanist perspective.  In addition to demonstrating the competencies of problem-solving, analysis, and decision making, this paper also demonstrates research skills. I accessed and critically evaluated a number of sources for quality, applicability, and relevance, and critically reviewed literature in-depth. 

To create the MDDE663 Final Presentation, I investigated edublogging in more depth, and used the blogging feature intensively within Me2U. I posted my reflections on my own experiences using the blog, and reported on edublogging resources. I also explored and analyzed the blogs of expert edubloggers from several countries, and reviewed the academic literature for case studies about edublogging. This artifact is a collection of resources I used as part of an online presentation for my MDDE663 peers compiled within the Me2U e-portfolio tool. This artifact is a collection of online resources created about the topic of edublogging. There are a number of blog posts included that demonstrate the use of discussion memes, reflective summaries, path-sharing, drafts of ideas and proposals, and reflections on practice, which involve the weaving of theory with practice. In addition, the presentation includes a Word document that summarizes in table form a tentative edublogging framework, as well the slides from the Power-point presentation given to the MDDE663 cohort. Finally, there is a list of annotated bookmarks. Thus, this artifact demonstrates that I can use a variety of communication and document sharing tools to create, reflect, and communicate with others.

The MDDE691 - Case Study  is significant as it required a number of competencies. For example, to sift through the 160 posts and classify them and identify patterns of use, and then describe these patterns using transcript analysis. I also applied VSM theory to describe the development of my blogging activity over time. I needed to find and access information, evaluate the relevance of information, compare options, formulate questions, and make reasoned arguments and present these in a coherent form to others.

The Case Study explored my learning journey as a student blogger on Athabasca University’s social network using a multi-method approach, combining narrative inquiry, transcript analysis, and educational biography, as well as quantitative data from web log files to analyze 159 blog posts over fifteen months of continuous blogging activity. The first part of the case study explored my impressions and reflections about blogging, describing activity from a variety of quantitative data sources, such as frequency of the use of specific tags, number of posts, comments, and web traffic data. The second part of this case study used educational biography to explore my experiences, reflections and impressions. The third part of the case study analyzed blog posts using transcript analysis to document evidence of knowledge construction and network construction processes. To complete the case study, I needed to draw upon and apply a number of communication and document sharing tools such as delicious, podcasting, rich pictures, and tag clouds and RSS feeds using an aggregator. While completing this case study, I needed to formulate questions and reasoned arguments to support my conclusions.