Personal Learning Experiences

Elementary School Experience

This learning experience did not take place at school but it is a very authentic and precious one to me. When I was only 6 or 7 years old, I started mastering reading at a beginner level and since my mother is from a different country than my father's and in a bilingual family, there was a challenge I had is to learn that language properly. My parents bought us a lot of books and my mother was concerned with books that teach the language to children and cassette tapes then. I used to take the books and teach myself to read with the help of the tapes by imitating and repetition. With the help of my mother as the model and supporter and my internal motive of belonging to this place and language. I was successful to master reading and even cursive writing in a short time. Behaviourism, Constructivism and Cognitivism were the approaches. I am very proud of this experience because I chose it with my free will, I constructed my own knowledge, I motivated myself, took actions and made connections and got a lot of persuasive feedback at that young age and still.

University Experience

As a Systems and Biomedical Engineering senior, it was my first time to work on a complete project on the basis of Project Based Learning (PBL). It was about delivering Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals through a port that was decoded and then re-encoded through programming tools and sent wirelessly to a computer application. We had to set a problem, create a prototype, set the tools, brainstorm the routes, organize and divide tasks, document our work, decode, create a cod, implement and get feedback and whatever it gets to complete the project. Tools were limited and costly but it was a success in the end. During this experience, I had passed by almost every learning theory. Connectivism approaches were a little limited at that time while Constructivism and Cognitivism principles were the dominant because of the much information processing, social learning and knowledge construction we had to apply.

Professional Experience

When I started my very first job in a multi-national company, I was told that I had to take courses during the working day whenever possible on what was called (that company's) university. Studying instructional design now, I remembered those courses and how informative, simple and quick were they! They taught me a lot about the company, the process and flow of work in the company and the field itself. At the beginning, I thought how boring and time consuming is this in the middle of a busy day but when I started taking them, it was on the contrary. Microlearning made me remember them although they were old-fachioned microlearning techniques. In such work environments, I learnt the value of connectivism especially, in that specific field although I knew nothing about learning theories back then.