In this report, I will reflect on what I’ve learnt in the course ‘Learning and Communicating Online’ and in particular, I’ll discuss what I have learnt about finding, using and evaluating online sources for academic communication. I’ll also discuss how my ideas of using online sources of information have developed during the course and how the development of an informational resource has helped me understand how to evaluate the credibility of online sources in an academic environment. I will also reflect on the advantages and limitations of working collaboratively in an online community.

Firstly, researching a topic through the use of different online resources including informational websites and social media platforms helped me understand not only ‘how I learn’ but also that you can learn different things from different resources. During the course I researched information on MyLink, Holden’s infotainment system. The online resources I used to help with my research included: YouTube, GM Holden website, Reddit, Wikipedia and CarAdvice.com.au. Researching through Wikipedia helped me learn about Piaget’s Constructivist Theory (Atherton, JS 2010) which suggests that when we learn, we build on prior knowledge which is called ‘Assimilation’ and when we change our perceptions or alter our pre-existing knowledge when we learn new information this is called ‘Accommodation.’ From learning this, I knew that I was learning through what Piaget called ‘Assimilation’ where I was able to fit new information from Wikipedia including the finding that Mylink featured Voice Recognition Software, Advanced Automatic Collision Notification and Vehicle Diagnostic Information, to my pre-existing knowledge of the infotainment system.
Through researching via YouTube, I learned ‘how to use MyLink’ with the demo clip. Learning this changed my perception from ‘MyLink being quite confusing and too technical to operate’ to ‘MyLink is easy to use and convenient’ – this helped me learn about ‘Accommodation’ in the constructivist model (Atherton, JS 2010) which is when you learn something new and you alter your pre-existing knowledge based on the new information.
The Mylink forum and Reddnit resources were very similar and I learnt that they both used Vygotsky’s (Wees, D 2010) theory on Social Constructivism which suggests that we learn better when we are engaging socially. The two forums allow ‘anyone’ or members to contribute to the topic.

The experience in researching the infotainment system through different online resources and reading up on the theories of ‘how I learn’ was great and made me focus on 'what I was learning' and 'how I was learning it'. It made me realise how important it is to use a variety of different resources when researching a topic because you learn new and different information with each resource and it adds more value to your research when you do use more resources. I also learnt about my role as a consumer in knowledge.
Based on the article "Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media" (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010) I also learnt about blogs, content communities, social networking sites and self-presentation and how to classify my most-used social media platforms in these categories. I classified Facebook and LinkedIn as a ‘social networking site’ and also ‘self-presentation’ because I mainly use them to connect with others by sharing my personal profile. I classified SharePoint as a ‘Content Community’ because I use it to share content and media with my colleagues. I use my Instagram account as a blog and also to view other fashion bloggers, so I classified this under ‘Blog’. I also reviewed the six different types of social media users (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010) during the course and I learnt that my behaviour changes across different social media platforms. For Instagram, I fall under ‘The Creator’ as I create my own fashion blog, however I also fall under ‘The Critic’ on other social media platforms including adelaidenow.com.au because I like to comment on news stories. I also fall under ‘The Joiner’ because I manage multiple media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) and lastly, I’m also ‘The Spectator’ because I like to search and view YouTube videos but I don’t feel the need to comment on those. These two activities really made me think about my role in being a sharer and producer of knowledge in an online environment and made me think about how technology makes it easy for us to be able to share and contribute ideas, content and feedback online.
During the course I also experienced working collaboratively in an online community creating an informational source. An online informational source can help develop knowledge and allows you to share it with a wider audience. I learnt that online presentation tools and informational sources can showcase your content in a more creative and engaging way which improves accessibility by providing flexibility over presentation forms and spaces (Picardo 2009). I used Prezi during this course to showcase our group presentation and learned that you can import video, images, music and links and create written content using Prezi.
Using the checklist model’s five key criteria (Metzger, 2007) which suggests that resources should be assessed based on their accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency and coverage; I learnt how to assess whether or not the resources I used are credible. Out of the resources I used during the first assessment, I learned that Wikipedia, YouTube and the Holden website were credible sources; however Reddit and the MyLink Forum were not credible sources for accurate information in regards to my topic. Using the checklist model’s five key criteria I learnt how to critic a source for its credibility and will now use this model in the future to help identify if a source is worthy of being used. I never thought to check for a date or objectivity of the source and this really inspired me to look into the credibility of my resources more often.
One challenge I had during this course was critiquing other members' work and providing constructive feedback during the group collaborative presentation. This is where the positive, negative, positive approach really proved to be helpful for me. Our group needed more communication around our presentation formatting and I provided some feedback to the members in our group about this using the positive, negative, positive approach. I learnt that Learning requires feedback (Senge 1990) and I felt that it was important to contribute constructive feedback and suggestions to the rest of the team on the final Prezi once we had all submitted our presentations. During this exercise I realised how easy it was to provide feedback to the members of my online group and that working collaboratively in an online community has some great advantages. I believe that being able to provide constructive criticism to the team is one of the main advantages, but having the technology and tools to be able to easily communicate and share or create and contribute ideas and content to the team or straight to the presentation is the main advantage that I identified. There are also some drawbacks or limitations in working in a group and ‘social loafing’ is one of them. Social loafing occurs when nothing gets done because everyone thinks someone else will do the job (Giles, G 2014). This is why I learnt that it is important to clearly assign members with specific tasks and responsibilities up front and this is something I will certainly do when working in groups in the future. Research on collaborative work helped me learn from some of the drawbacks faced in my group and I was able to learn from them using Eikenberry’s ‘Nine ways to contribute to a project team’s success’ (2008) which provided me with some guidelines for working effectively in future group collaborative projects and included having a clear focus on the end goal, getting all team members to cooperate and collaborate and participate, and Identify clear roles and task allocation (Eikenberry, 2008). To conclude, this course has allowed me to explore and learn about my role in being a consumer, sharer and producer of knowledge in an online environment. I have also learnt how to assess if an online source in credible enough to use and also how I can be a reliable contributor to an online source. I learnt the importance of using credible sources and a variety of sources in order to add value to research. I also learnt the advantages and limitations of working collaboratively in an online community and that learning in a socially engaging environment can help us learn better. I learnt how to provide good constructive criticism to help not only myself, but other’s learn. Lastly, I learnt that learning online has a lot of benefits with the main benefit being that you have the opportunity to consume, produce, contribute to and share knowledge and content very easily.

REFERENCES

Atherton, JS 2010, Learning and teaching: constructivism in learning, www.learningandteaching.info/learning/constructivism.htm>, viewed 24 May, 2014
Eikenberry K, 2008, ‘Nine ways to contribute to project team success’, http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/pdf/nine-ways-to-contribute-to-project-team-success.pdf, viewed 14 May, 2014/
Giles, G 2014, Social Loafing: Definition, Examples & Theory, http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/social-loafing-definition-examples-theory.html#lesson, viewed, 28 May 2014

Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010, "Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media" pp. 59 – 68, http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/science/article/pii/S0007681309001232, viewed, 24 May, 2014
Metzger, Miriam J, 2007, Journal of the American Society for information Science and Technology, Vol 58, Issue 13, p2078 – 2091
Picardo 2009, Box of Tricks, ‘Top five online presentation tools’, http://www.boxoftricks.net/2009/05/top-five-online-presentation-tools/, viewed, 18 May, 2014
Senge, P, 1990, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday.