From Re: Welcome Informal Learners! by gunnarbruckner on Wed May 17 11:00:00 2006:
Jay
and all the others will agree that there is a huge potential to be
unleashed...if only we knew how? I suggest to open a thread on very
practical ideas.
Gunnar's suggestion makes sense: Let's open the tap for offering/developing/ sharing practical ideas. Since, as Gunnar points out, we're all here to discover, collaboratively invent or massage into being practical ideas that don't really exist yet, or are just emerging, don't hesitate to offer unfinished inklings, initial thoughts, new tools that seem right for the job...any and all promising, down-to-earth bits and bytes that we can collectively puzzle over and try piecing together. Possibilities?
Sarah Haavind
Posts made by Sarah Haavind
Informal greetings to you all ? great that Chris, Timothy, Minh, Derek and Jay have jumped on board already <waving happily and smiling>! Nancy is busily preparing her short list of community contexts that Chris requested as well as some additional resources to jumpstart our wiki on informal learning. (You?ll find our wiki at the top of your ?Jump to? list in the upper right-hand corner of your Scope screen.) We hope everyone will contribute resources to as well as start exploring our Informal Learning Resources wiki. Then bring your thoughts and discoveries back here!
Jay presented his new book at an off-site session I attended at AERA last month, on the campus of San Francisco State University (was anyone else there?). His talk was called, ?Informal Learning: Push vs Pull Learning, Democratization of Work, and Workflow Learning.? It was entertaining and thought provoking and we?re glad to have you join us here. I look forward to learning even more about your perspective and insights.
Timothy?s great questions made me think of the last provocative book I know of related to our topic, Brown & Duguid?s Social Social Life of Information (2000). If you don?t already have a copy covered in highlighter and fraying at the edges in your library, I highly recommend picking up a used copy when you put your name in to reserve your copy of Jay?s new book.
Derek?s story prompts one of my own:
The challenge seems to be avoiding the pitfalls pointed out when Minh focused our collective lens on the terms ?formal? and ?structured? vs. chaos?is there something more synonymous with chaos that we can shape intentionally? Slippery, isn?t it?More stories, insights, introductions anyone?
Jay presented his new book at an off-site session I attended at AERA last month, on the campus of San Francisco State University (was anyone else there?). His talk was called, ?Informal Learning: Push vs Pull Learning, Democratization of Work, and Workflow Learning.? It was entertaining and thought provoking and we?re glad to have you join us here. I look forward to learning even more about your perspective and insights.
Timothy?s great questions made me think of the last provocative book I know of related to our topic, Brown & Duguid?s Social Social Life of Information (2000). If you don?t already have a copy covered in highlighter and fraying at the edges in your library, I highly recommend picking up a used copy when you put your name in to reserve your copy of Jay?s new book.
Derek?s story prompts one of my own:
Following an AERA session two years ago, Mark Schlager, Etienne Wenger and I were building a description of our vision for what teacher professional development should look like. Key elements included online collaborative tools such as Tapped In 2 and teacher-led inquiry that resembled what Etienne has termed the ?horizontalization" of learning. I added content-based case studies, such as those developed at The Concord Consortium for Seeing Math as context for dialogue. Our collective vision reflected the recognized value of creating opportunities for informal learning.
The challenge seems to be avoiding the pitfalls pointed out when Minh focused our collective lens on the terms ?formal? and ?structured? vs. chaos?is there something more synonymous with chaos that we can shape intentionally? Slippery, isn?t it?More stories, insights, introductions anyone?
Welcome to the latest Scope seminar. As I've prepared to co-lead our collaborative exchange with Nancy, I've realized that informal learning is sort of like inquiry: it?s tough to hold onto and replicate informal learning experiences for others. As soon as informal learning is set into a structure, it?s easily lost. However, also like inquiry, informal learning is no less valuable for its slippery ways.
This three week seminar is intended for those interested in the inherent potential of understanding informal learning more deeply. Please join us with your latest insights and questions about informal learning! We?ll weave together the latest, cohesive quilt of knowledge nuggets, gems, half-baked ideas, as well as emerging approaches to informal learning using our newest tools ? blogs, del.icio.us, RSS, whatever! Come on in, let?s play?to get us started, please introduce yourself and offer some initial thoughts or compelling experiences of informal learning. What do we know?
This three week seminar is intended for those interested in the inherent potential of understanding informal learning more deeply. Please join us with your latest insights and questions about informal learning! We?ll weave together the latest, cohesive quilt of knowledge nuggets, gems, half-baked ideas, as well as emerging approaches to informal learning using our newest tools ? blogs, del.icio.us, RSS, whatever! Come on in, let?s play?to get us started, please introduce yourself and offer some initial thoughts or compelling experiences of informal learning. What do we know?
Hear, hear. Thank you, Paul and to all the others who joined in. So much intriguing insight surfaced during this dialogue that was appreciated -- as I've found it does in Scope dialogues generally.
I kept thinking of Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information (2000, 2002) as the reflective postings passed by. I'll let everyone make their own connections...
I especially enjoyed Paul's fresh (refreshing) writing style. It was a nicely orchestrated dialogue. Fleeting, but so useful.
Good luck on your family excursion!
Best,
Sarah
I kept thinking of Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information (2000, 2002) as the reflective postings passed by. I'll let everyone make their own connections...
I especially enjoyed Paul's fresh (refreshing) writing style. It was a nicely orchestrated dialogue. Fleeting, but so useful.
Good luck on your family excursion!
Best,
Sarah
Paul asks me to elaborate on my decision to seek out a minimum thread depth of four before I called an exchange a "collaborative event" in m study. I'm not surprised Paul got stuck on this point -- I admit I made it up, it doesn't come from the literature. I've attached an excerpt from my methodology (6 pages) that explains in detail. The short answer though, is that there is a predominance in VHS of responses to discussion questions that are not conversational but all directly replying to the discussion seed post (thread depth of 1). Even if students read what others post, that isn't collaborative learning. It's looking at one anothers' answers (which can be okay, but it doesn't fit for "collaborative learning.")
In the past few years, following the evaluation study conducted by SRI (see: Kozma and Zucker's "The Virtual High School: Teaching Generation V" at amazon.com) of VHS when it was a grant-funded project of the US Dept of Education, VHS moved away from discussions that amounted to everyone's homework paper being passed up to the front in a f2f classroom by adding to discussion directions something like: "Post an initial response to the question and then reply to the initial postings of one or two of your peers." This resulted in a great increase (about 50% of the courses) in thread depths of just two. In other words, those pragmatic teenagers followed the directions literally. They posted their initial comment and then chose two others to read and reply to, directly. Again, no converstaion. If you look at the threaded discussion, you would see initial posts with six or seven postings directly beneath, all the way down the class. I decided that wasn't collaboration either.
Once in a while, there would be a thread depth of three. In my overall survey of the 112 courses offered in spring 2003, I looked at as many of those as I noticed. In most cases, the third post was the original author returning and thanking the other student for the comment or nodding outloud in agreement. No building.
However, once a thread depth reached four, building was happening. Let me know if that doesn't quite answer your questions. Paul is right that Harasim's categories had nothing to do with thread depth. I applied her categories to all the collaborative events identified in each course studied to assess the level of actual collaboration around content vs. social excahnges or evaluations/simple agreement. Again those pragmatic teenagers -- they were extremely focused on content in almost all cases. There are student lounges in all VHS courses, as well as getting-to-know-you ice breakers. All the small talk found its way there pretty quickly. The content dialogues were across the board, pretty much highly content-focused and content-rich (if not often collaborative).
Sarah
In the past few years, following the evaluation study conducted by SRI (see: Kozma and Zucker's "The Virtual High School: Teaching Generation V" at amazon.com) of VHS when it was a grant-funded project of the US Dept of Education, VHS moved away from discussions that amounted to everyone's homework paper being passed up to the front in a f2f classroom by adding to discussion directions something like: "Post an initial response to the question and then reply to the initial postings of one or two of your peers." This resulted in a great increase (about 50% of the courses) in thread depths of just two. In other words, those pragmatic teenagers followed the directions literally. They posted their initial comment and then chose two others to read and reply to, directly. Again, no converstaion. If you look at the threaded discussion, you would see initial posts with six or seven postings directly beneath, all the way down the class. I decided that wasn't collaboration either.
Once in a while, there would be a thread depth of three. In my overall survey of the 112 courses offered in spring 2003, I looked at as many of those as I noticed. In most cases, the third post was the original author returning and thanking the other student for the comment or nodding outloud in agreement. No building.
However, once a thread depth reached four, building was happening. Let me know if that doesn't quite answer your questions. Paul is right that Harasim's categories had nothing to do with thread depth. I applied her categories to all the collaborative events identified in each course studied to assess the level of actual collaboration around content vs. social excahnges or evaluations/simple agreement. Again those pragmatic teenagers -- they were extremely focused on content in almost all cases. There are student lounges in all VHS courses, as well as getting-to-know-you ice breakers. All the small talk found its way there pretty quickly. The content dialogues were across the board, pretty much highly content-focused and content-rich (if not often collaborative).
Sarah