It's Week 1 of the Learning Challenge (LC) and I have set aside 30 minutes to practice the art of knotcraft. The first website I went to was "Knots: How to Tie Knots"; I was not impressed with the rather short but pedestrian instructions with the naff looking illustrations - if I was having trouble understanding how to tie easy knots, what was it going to be like with the more complex ones?

The next website, "Ropers Knot Page", has slightly longer, but equally, pedestrian instructions with rather confusing looking illustrations that don't do anything to enlighten me as to what I am suppose to be doing. I am beginning to wonder if I have chosen an appropriate learning challenge - certainly the free resources I am using are not explaining themselves very well.

My next resource, "I Will Knot", is something of a revelation to me. It uses a mixture of short, sharp videos and short, but still, pedestrian instructions. But it is the videos that work for me. When it comes to something that involves a motor skill, I am someone who likes to be shown so that I can mimic and keep practicing that skill. In that sense I could be considered as a kinesthetic learner.

This also suggests to me that if you want someone to learn something online, the materials / resources you create will be dependent upon the task / skills / knowledge / information that you wish to convey to your students.

So, do you use drawings, photographs, videos, audio recordings or text to put across something that needs to be learnt? Should this resource be passive or interactive? Can the learner work in isolation or does this require a collaborative / community dimension?

Interesting questions indeed!

This is now Week 4 of the Learning Challenge (LC) and I've been a little naughty in that I have allowed the "Learner Analysis" assignment to interfere with the LC. The "Learner Analysis" assignment is due to be submitted on Sunday 26th October and I have probably spent more than is actually necessary on it.

I am back on the "I Will Knot" website to refamiliarise myself with the knots that I was practicing before the assignment got in the way. It's amazing how much you quickly forget because you haven't been practicing to the point where it "sticks" or "clicks" into place. At the moment, I am practicing once with the knot with the aid of the step-by-step video and then a further three times without the aid of the video - the trick is to try and repeat this tomorrow without the aid of the video at all!

On the subject of the "I Will Knot" website, I mentioned to a colleague of mine who teaches Chemistry at my University and has just been appointed a Learning and Teaching Co-ordinator for my Faculty that I was doing this learning challenge as part of my MSc and showed her the website I was using. She was most impressed by it - NOT because it showed you how to tie knots in easy step-by-step videos BUT how the idea behind the easy step-by-step videos could be used to show a particular Science experiment / practical to a group of students.

This visual aspect to learning is indeed a powerful motivator, and if done properly it could instruct students better than just reading it out of a textbook.