Bless me reader for I have sinned - #ocTEL week 0

Bless me reader, for I have sinned. It has been two and a half years since my last blog post ;-)

It seems like I never take the time to reflect and work on my own professional development. There's always so much stuff that needs to be done, with a higher priority - but often with less importance, if you think of it.

So - by way of penance - I decided to join the 2nd run of the open course on Technology-enhanced Learning (#ocTEL), after hearing so much positive feedback at last year's ALT Conference (#altc2013).

What's my main goal in attending ocTEL this year? What do I want to achieve? Well, you could call it industrial espionage. Together with Wilfred Rubens (@wrubens), I will be developing a MOOC on blended learning at the Welten Institute of the Open University in the Netherlands. I want to learn which tools we could use in our MOOC, and see how we can connect those to our main site (a Liferay-based learning environment).

Moreover, I want to test whether I can use my attendance in the course as credit for our internal professional development requirements, and whether it would be useful to direct my colleagues to next year's ocTEL.

ocTEL is not my first MOOC, so I kind of know what to expect in terms of overwhelming experiences, getting lost, and finding interesting people to network with. So I have attended the first webinar, and based on that, I have started a Scoop.it topic, that I am hoping to populate together with co-curators from the ocTEL course.