Jenny Mackness

I am not sufficiently active in SCoPE to answer all your questions Sylvia, but I can  answer three of them

What have you liked about SCoPE? SCoPE is a very friendly and open community and does not discrimate against lurkers such as me :-)

How has SCoPE helped you? Sylvia was enormously helpful in a MOOC (FSLT12) that I recently worked on to design and run with Oxford Brookes University, UK. She not only offered us the use of the SCoPE Blackboard Collaborate site for our synchronous sessions, but also supported us in the use of this site and provided very valuable advice. We possibly could have run the MOOC without synchronous sessions, but it would not have been anywhere near as successful. What was particularly impressive was that we did not seek this help. Sylvia offered it to us and gave of her time freely.

What are your ideas for future activities?

• Continue cross boundary work which exemplifies best open practice - which is what the Oxford Brookes team were fortunate to experience
• Perhaps ask for feedback into the SCoPE community of this cross-boundary work.

Thank you Sylvia and the SCoPE community

Jenny (on behalf of myself and the Oxford Brookes team)

Hello Janet - I am looking forward to the session this evening. (I am based in the UK). I have used Skype for interviews for a paper I worked on in 2008 - and used Pamela for Skype for recording. I have also conducted email interviews for another paper I wrote.

Thanks for sharing your framework.

Jenny

Hi Emma - I can't cope with mind-mapping either, although I am very familiar with them and have taught students to use them. My own mind just does not work like this - and what's more I find it difficult to interpret other people's mind maps. But - I do have colleagues that use them brilliantly - and so long as they interpret them for me I find they can really move thinking forward.

The tool that I am used to is Cmap.

Jenny

Hi Sylvia - I'm wondering what discussions I am missing. I can only find 7 waves! Should I be searching for new waves on a regular basis? I only found the 7th wave after seeing your message.

Jenny

We seem to have made the assumption that collaboration is a good thing. One of the worst learning experiences I had was on my MA when we had to collaborate to produce a group presentation. I ended up feeling that I had to compromise my beliefs and educational philosophy to fit in with the group.

I can clearly remember Stephen Downes at an ALT-C conference (2005) saying that collaboration is - "the joining up of things that do not naturally want to be joined up" - http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2005/09/altc_stephen_do.html

Shock horror in the conference audience!

I also remember the first time I read Ferreday and Hodgson's article which they presented at the 2008 Networked Learning Conference -

The Tyranny of Participation and Collaboration in Networked Learning - www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2008/abstracts/PDFs/Hodgson_640-647.pdf

This article has made me a lot more sympathetic to students who want to do their own thing.

Whilst I have had some extremely enjoyable and fruitful collaborative learning experiences, it is not always a positive experience and I think in some circumstances can be detrimental to learning. I can't imagine the anti-social genius Newton wanting to collaborate! Would we have his laws of motion if he had been required to work in a team?