Sylvia C just reminded me about the excellent questions appearing in the Open Forum. Check out Colleen's latest post for some really insightful queries, & feel free to add questions (or answers?) of your own.
Gina Bennett
Posts made by Gina Bennett
How was your Hallowe'en, people? We had 43 visitors, the most yet since our move to Hope. We almost ran out of candy -- & of course that had nothing to do with our rigorous quality control practice of "checking the product" every so often.
It's Day 4 (already!) of our microcourse. If you're following the recommended Activity Plan, you'll be somewhere along in the process of wrapping up your community-building "creation" & sharing it with the class. Indeed, if you check the Sharing & Feedback forum, you'll see 4 unique drafts of activities designed to initiate, develop, or further a sense of community among a group of learners.
If you haven't posted a community-building creation, no worries -- there's still time to do that. If all you've got is a rough idea or a 2-sentence concept, post it anyway & let us ponder it with you!
If you've already posted a creation, now is the time to explore ...
- read, respond, & (if time permits) try out a community-building activity or 2 from your classmates
- dig a little deeper to reflect on one or 2 questions posed by classmates about your activity.
hi Sylvia,
I'm thinking this could be pretty engaging. If you wanted a slight variation, you could assign only 1 image to the first student (or victim ;-) . Each of the remaining students is assigned a date on which they must add one image (anything at all, as long as it furthers the storyline) to the shared story-space. This would be a way to spread out the activity, possibly less work for you.
But '5-card Flickr' has a nice ring to it & I expect anything designed by Cogdog to be solid. Whichever way you offered it, I think having a community building exercise at the beginning of a program is an excellent idea. You could engage a lot of learners with an activity like this & for sure it would be FUN.
Beth, after you mentioned the potential of using Coggle to mindmap (perhaps as an introductory community-building activity) in our Resource list, I revisited Coggle (turns out I already had an account -- duh!) & played around for a good hour. The drop-dead easiness of the app & the intuitiveness of the interface is really attractive. Designing a "tree" would be pretty easy to do & it's a nice metaphor.
I suppose you could also adapt this activity for a more targeted purpose: e.g. when students are about to choose team members for a group assignment, they could create a Coggle tree with their philosophy, team working preferences, key interests etc. & that could be a low-risk way to identify best matches for team members. I dunno... just starting to think of all kinds of ways this visual could be used in community-sustaining ways.
Hillarie, you mentioned ...
>>How do individual activities (like this one) lead to community building?? ... how do we move beyond this to actually building a community
... & I've been thinking about that all morning. I think to answer such questions we have to re-visit the even more obtuse questions: "Why are we trying to "build a community" in this course, anyway?" and "How will we know when we *have* built a community? What will it look like, feel like, how will things be different once we have this elusive community in place?" Your idea about grounding this activity within indigenous ways of knowing sounds like a good starting point.
I will continue to ponder this but would sure welcome other thoughts on this.