Active and productive participation in the process of learning through online dialogue. Collaboration and fluency increase as online communication skills develop and informal and anecdotal narrative begins to flourish. Desired practice such as disclosure, openness, brevity, and questioning needs to be modelled by the facilitator at this point, and strategies for the discernment of relevance need to be conveyed to stay abreast of the volumes of messages which are generated at this stage. Effective use and appropriation of the technology is evidenced by the participants delight in initiating various collaborative experiments. Self-directed learning can now begin in earnest.
Participants become willing to initiate their own experiments and online learning projects.
This progression can be fast for some individuals whilst others may not reach the later stages. Expectations OLN participants individual expectations for online learning varied from requests for information and course provision, to indepth theoretical discussion, to experimental collaboration. A number of people requested more structure and direction than was provided by the OLN fortnightly discussion framework, whilst others were happy that the environment was so open. The disparity in needs, levels of skill, experience and learning styles, poses significant challenges for online learning environments design. There is no doubt however, that OLN has spawned its own social network and that cross-fertilisation between diverse participants can provide a rich bed for learning.