Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course

Course number three for me in the certificate for emerging technologies for learning is CCK09. I'm glad that it is the third course, as I have had time to learn about and use many different tools which will allow me to focus on more on course content. I've added a folder to my Google Reader for CCK09 feeds (Google alerts, blogs, twitter, The Daily, course website, etc). I already use my reader on a daily basis to keep up with work related feeds, so this is a great place for me to put CCK09 info as well.

Before I signed up for this course I read some of the post from last years participants and found that there was a common theme of feeling overwhelmed and not being able to keep up with everything that was going on. So my plan is to be selective. Though, I'm not sure how I'm going to do that intelligently, how can I choose the best info when I haven't viewed it all! Of course I have this problem at work as well, how can I provide an evidence based answer to a drug related question if I haven't review all of the evidence. In this environment I can go to systematic reviews, meta-analyses, clinical practice guidelines, and experts to filter the important information. I will have to find out what filters are useful in this environment.

I would not consider myself an "educator", but when you think about it, a major component of a health care professionals job is to educate (patients, the public, students, other professionals), so I'm sure that I will take away something useful from this course.

I have never studied learning theories, so week 1 has been a lot of reading and listening and browsing. Next I need to work on connecting and participating. I can now empathize with pharmacy students I teach, asking someone to participate when the information is completely new and foreign can be very intimidating. I need to remember this when I am in my comfortable drug information pharmacy world.