Seminar

#GO_GN goes to Cape Town, see you there ;) 

Reblogged post from Chrissi Nerantzi – read the full post at https://chrissinerantzi.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/go_gn-goes-to-cape-town-see-you-there/

I feel very fortunate to be a member of the Global OER Graduate Network since September 2015. Thanks to GO-GN I have connected with many fellow PhD students in open education from across the world as well as experienced and successful GO-GN scholars.

Until this happened, being a PhD student was an extremely lonely experience and while many will say that the internal motivation is a strong motivator to go on… external stimulation and feeling part of a community play a vital role in helping us feel stronger, and help us believe that we can do this.

In a few weeks time, I will be travelling to Cape Town. Not really looking forward to the flight… but I won’t be on my own and it will be mainly during the night, so hopefully, I will be able to close my eyes and just imagine I am somewhere else.

Can’t wait to see everybody in Cape Town for the next GO-GN event (just did my homework and the draft presentation linked to my studies is also ready). Planning to sprinkle local pictures over it when I am there. Will be exciting to find out about my peers research and the progress they are making. Last year, it has been such a valuable experience in Krakow. I had no idea what to expect when I arrived there. The GO-GN event was particularly successful as there were peers at different stages of their studies and that helped me position myself, realise that I had made some progress, but also see where you were hoping to go. They say it is not healthy to compare yourself with others, and I agree, but in this case, it just worked and motivated me to do more and better to get there. The selection of peers was therefore spot on, I feel. The Open Education Global 2016 that took place afterwards was also an enlightening experience.

flickr photo by wenzday01 https://flickr.com/photos/wenzday01/17820776192 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

This year, I will have the opportunity to present some of the findings linked to my research at the Open Education Global 2017 conference which will take after our GO-GN event. I have just submitted the second full draft of my thesis to supervisors and am waiting for their feedback

Thank you to all colleagues from GO-GN and my peers whom I have met online and offline for bringing light into my PhD journey. The conversations we had especially with Viv and Penny about our studies have been invaluable! I am sure that many of the connections will last far beyond these studies and I will be forever grateful to Bea, Beck, Nat, Rob and Martin, the GO-GN team, for creating so many valuable opportunities and supporting me in such a fruitful way.

I hope to see you there ?

Source: #GO_GN goes to Cape Town, see you there 😉 – Chrissi Nerantzi

Leave a Reply

css.php