Thanks, Sylvia, for starting this conversation -- I know I certainly need to build skills in this area. I'm sure that neither the skill I may have as a speaker-in-person nor any ability I've brought to building asynchronous, threaded dialogue call for the same skill set as webcasts. It seems that delivery is an essential part of comedy and one area I'm not good at for sure.
Heather's idea of shifting the presentation into a conversational mode gives me a leg up. It's collaborative, which is an asset already. If I'm incapable of being/sounding funny, perhaps a partner could help me find the humor.
In addition, I can see how two voices would add interest and break up an otherwise dry delivery (Click and Clack, the car guys on public radio come to mind -- who knew car maintenance could be so hilarious?). I'd love to hear more ideas, cautions, solutions...
Sarah Haavind
Posts made by Sarah Haavind
I just spent the better part of yesterday gathering what I could on educational uses of blogging and then I saw Sylvia's request about community uses. Interesting! I have now started a blog myself, finally, in the spirit of learning by doing.
You can visit my blog at http://elgg.net/sarahh/weblog/. Remember, I just started yesterday. ;-) But if you go there, you will see some of the resources I've found on the topic. Thanks for these go to my colleague, the ever-helpful Curt Bonk. His blog is here: http://travelinedman.blogspot.com/
I also poked around this link: http://www.blogger.com a bit. So far my conclusions about the educational uses of blogging are that they can be valuable for individuals, but I'm not sure how they add value to communities particularly. Sure, you can comment on postings in the blog, but it doesn't seem you can reply-to-reply. (Am I wrong about that?). Keeping the thread depth at two seems a move backwards, not forward, from the community perspective.
I can see how people appreciate the way they find their public voice with a blog. I think that is what draws us to blogging. Perhaps a community could collectively build a blog, but it seems like a threaded discussion is much more functional for a community. I don't quite see the value of replacing a newletter with a blog.
From a course perspective, Sylvia's description of how she used a blog in Knowplace as a kind of meta-conversation about the real conversation sounded like a really neat tool -- though as she points out, a neat tool for faciliators of conversations teaching others to facilitate conversations, not necessarily for other teaching contexts.
So hummmm. Yes, I'm a little stumped. To hear about it at conferences, it sounds like suddenly we have a new hammer and everything is a nail. I have heard of some neat educational uses however: In a foreign language class, everyone must keep a blog in the new language. (However, I wonder how easy it is for the instructor to view them all at grading time?) Any online journaling activity would work. Members of a group project could gather material and ideas in a blog so everything is together (though I'm not sure why that is better than a threaded bulletin board). The instructor wouldn't necessarily need to visit these. Hummmm.
I'm interested to hear what others can offer to Sylvia's questions from the community perspective. I also wonder, has anyone integrated blogs into a course they taught or participated in a course where blogs were used?
Sarah
You can visit my blog at http://elgg.net/sarahh/weblog/. Remember, I just started yesterday. ;-) But if you go there, you will see some of the resources I've found on the topic. Thanks for these go to my colleague, the ever-helpful Curt Bonk. His blog is here: http://travelinedman.blogspot.com/
I also poked around this link: http://www.blogger.com a bit. So far my conclusions about the educational uses of blogging are that they can be valuable for individuals, but I'm not sure how they add value to communities particularly. Sure, you can comment on postings in the blog, but it doesn't seem you can reply-to-reply. (Am I wrong about that?). Keeping the thread depth at two seems a move backwards, not forward, from the community perspective.
I can see how people appreciate the way they find their public voice with a blog. I think that is what draws us to blogging. Perhaps a community could collectively build a blog, but it seems like a threaded discussion is much more functional for a community. I don't quite see the value of replacing a newletter with a blog.
From a course perspective, Sylvia's description of how she used a blog in Knowplace as a kind of meta-conversation about the real conversation sounded like a really neat tool -- though as she points out, a neat tool for faciliators of conversations teaching others to facilitate conversations, not necessarily for other teaching contexts.
So hummmm. Yes, I'm a little stumped. To hear about it at conferences, it sounds like suddenly we have a new hammer and everything is a nail. I have heard of some neat educational uses however: In a foreign language class, everyone must keep a blog in the new language. (However, I wonder how easy it is for the instructor to view them all at grading time?) Any online journaling activity would work. Members of a group project could gather material and ideas in a blog so everything is together (though I'm not sure why that is better than a threaded bulletin board). The instructor wouldn't necessarily need to visit these. Hummmm.
I'm interested to hear what others can offer to Sylvia's questions from the community perspective. I also wonder, has anyone integrated blogs into a course they taught or participated in a course where blogs were used?
Sarah
In response to Vivian's question, Have you or others had experience designing or working with this kind of learning environment?, it brings to mind a mid-term, public self-assessment activity I use in my courses to push the envelope on shifting the course culture from competitive to collaborative.
The idea is to ask students who are in week 6 of a 12-week seminar to go back and review their contributions to date and find one that they consider their most important contribution to the learning of the whole class. The full activity is presented here: http://www.concord.org/courses/facilitating/sample.html.
A few students will have something to post. Others will experience an "ah!ha!" moment and the culture of the class shifts greatly from that point forward.
At the end of the course, I build on that mid-term experience by asking them once again to search back, but this time through the postings of others and to bring forward one posting someone else contributed that greatly supported their learning. I also make a rule that no posts can be presented twice. The result is what I call a course "Gallery" of greatest insights that the learners build themselves.
Sarah
The idea is to ask students who are in week 6 of a 12-week seminar to go back and review their contributions to date and find one that they consider their most important contribution to the learning of the whole class. The full activity is presented here: http://www.concord.org/courses/facilitating/sample.html.
A few students will have something to post. Others will experience an "ah!ha!" moment and the culture of the class shifts greatly from that point forward.
At the end of the course, I build on that mid-term experience by asking them once again to search back, but this time through the postings of others and to bring forward one posting someone else contributed that greatly supported their learning. I also make a rule that no posts can be presented twice. The result is what I call a course "Gallery" of greatest insights that the learners build themselves.
Sarah
Thanks, Vivian, for raising this critical issue for designers up to the surface. I'm looking forward to hearing others' thoughts and experiences, but meanwhile, Marg Riel and her colleagues wrote a chapter for a forthcoming Tim S. Roberts book called, Self, Peer and Group Assessment in E-Learning (If you haven't seen his earlier book, Online Collaborative Learning: Theory and Practice, I highly recommend it). They presented it at AERA 2005. I think anyone interested in this topic will be intrigued. I've attached it as a pdf file.
Apologies to Bruce and everyone for referencing Linda Harasim without any extended references or citations. She has a chapter in Distance Education and Distributed Learning (Vrasidas & Glass 2002) called What Makes Online Learning Communities Successful? The Role of Collaborative Learning in Social and Intellectual Development. in which she describes analysis she conducted with the Global Educators Network (GEN) using the categories of postings I mentioned earlier: idea generating, idea linking and intellectual convergence.
More recently, in Learning Together Online: Research on Asynchronous Learning Networks (Hiltz & Goldman 2005), she collaborates with Raquel Benbunan-Fich and Starr Roxanne Hiltz on a chapter that also includes these categories. It's called The Online Interaction Learning Model: An Integrated Theoretical Framework for Learning Networks. I have found them both useful for thinking about analyzing patterns in threaded, asynchronous dialogue.
Sarah
More recently, in Learning Together Online: Research on Asynchronous Learning Networks (Hiltz & Goldman 2005), she collaborates with Raquel Benbunan-Fich and Starr Roxanne Hiltz on a chapter that also includes these categories. It's called The Online Interaction Learning Model: An Integrated Theoretical Framework for Learning Networks. I have found them both useful for thinking about analyzing patterns in threaded, asynchronous dialogue.
Sarah