Week 1 (28th July, 2008 -1st August, 2008) Orientation

The course of Facilitating Online Communities starts this week. I was looking forward to learn more online facilitating skills and imagined it would be very interesting and a challenge for me.

Supposing as a tutor / trainer who facilitates online community should be very familiar with the "places" that can gather people together as a community, e.g. forum, discussion board, blogs, wiki, discussion group, etc. But I am a lil bit worried. Although I am working in computing fields for years, I am still not quite familiar with above mentioned "places". For example, I spend hours to set up this blog, play around and get familiar with it. But according to the course requirement for this week, I have to set up a RSS News Reader and subscribe to the blogs of others in the class. Now I am struggling try to do it successfully. Maybe it will take a while for me to get things done...

I completed three other Applied eLearning courses online. Actually I am not "brand new" to online study. Just feel strange why I feel very stressful for this course? Is it because I am not familiar with Wiki, google group, and RSS?

I hope I can continue and successfully complete this course. I know there are several "classmates" doing the last paper enrolled into this course too. But I cannot find them... shame

Well, this week will be extremely hard for me. First, I need to be familiar with all the new tools for this course. Second, I dont want to feel be isolated, so still need to find others and maybe add their blogs into mine? Well... see how far I can go