A choose your own adventure course

We're only a few days into this course, and hopefully you're starting to see that this is a choose-your-own experience course.

Do you remember choose your own adventure books? Where you got to make decisions about what would happen next?

You are in a dark hallway. The only light is seeping through the crack of what may be a door at the end of the hall. You walk down the long, dark hallway toward the light. When you near the end of the hall, you pass a narrow table with a phone on it. Just as you reach the door at the end, you see an envelope on the floor. The envelope is halfway under the door. The phone begins to ring. You:
a. Answer the phone
b. Pick up the envelope
c. Open the door

I loved those books! The idea that I had a choice and could be immersed in the storytelling was so much fun.

I feel like this course is a similar experience. It's not entirely scripted, but it's also not entirely unscripted. You can be your own protagonist here. I'm going to use this post to highlight some of the choices you have and explain why (pedagogically speaking) I'm giving you this choice.

1. TOOLS

You get to choose which tools you will use, and which you won't use. I'm going to cover a lot of tools, and I'll set up play spaces and challenges for us in many of them. I also welcome suggestions for tools you may want to try that weren't on my original plan. I will never make you use a tool other than Canvas (a university expectation) and blogging (you choose the platform!).

Pedagogically, I feel strongly about having choice in this area. Forcing tools on students rarely goes well. Many of you are in this class with your own personal goals or agendas. I'd rather let you focus on the tools that interest you most rather than spread your time thin across many tools. You're also all at different levels in terms of comfort and prior experience. For some people, trying one new tool per week will be a good stretch. For others, three a week may be a better pace. It really doesn't matter. The tools are simply a means to an end. Also, if we blog about our tool experiences, we can learn vicariously through each other. And many of the tools allow you to just follow if you want a less direct/vivid experience. Case in point: If you never set up a Twitter account, you can still follow along via the tweets in our sidebar.

2. PEOPLE

You get to choose who you interact with. There are 25 other people here with whom you can interact. You can be a social butterfly, or hang with a few buddies (and I hope you won't relegate yourself to playing the wallflower). You're also not limited to this class. There's also a whole world out there, and if your goal in this class is to learn how to productively connect with ... I don't know who. Water buffalo breeders? Pastry chefs? Ultramarathoners? ... then you should be making those connections. I'll show you how, and you can go do it (and count it as participation). Pedagogically, I feel that it's important that I value and encourage your connections with people outside the class. If all you did was interact within the confines of our class community and you were limited to learning about interacting with others, you would be missing the opportunity to explore networks and then debrief them with the class.

3. PRIVACY

Will you be a John or Jane Doe? Or are you building your personal brand on the web, screaming your name from every mountaintop? Either is fine. Will you blog about your innermost thoughts (about social media, of course!) or provide impersonal reviews of tools? Totally up to you. Pedagogically, my goal is for you all to learn how to participate in social media learning environments and to learn how to help others do the same. I want you to see the full range of examples in this class, and by showing you all some of your privacy options and encouraging you to engage in discourse about it when you feel uncertain, I'm trying to model for you how the issue can be approached and demonstrate that there are many ways to participate with varying levels of privacy -- and none is the "best" or most correct way.

4. COMFORT ZONES

Everyone has one, and everyone's is different. I'm going to encourage you all to try things that are a bit out of yours, but I won't tell you what that should be. Pedagogically, risk-taking is a good thing, but it can easily go wrong. A forced risk that doesn't go well can hurt a learner's motivation, creating distrust and ill feelings in the class context. I don't want that! However, when people take small steps out of their comfort zones and feel at least somewhat in control of those steps, they're likely to succeed!

So, what is your adventure going to be? What do you choose? That's something for you to think about as we start to round out the first week (and continue to think about and discuss throughout the entire course). I can't wait to see the "books" you all write for yourselves over the next 12 weeks.