Posts made by Cindy Xin

Thank you Sarah for your thoughtful acknowledgment to everyone. I want to also thank Andrew Feenberg who posted after your closing comment. I had many great discussions with Andrew while writing my paper. His writings on online education and technology have been an inspiration for me. The timing of this seminar is somewhat unfortunate given people’s summer schedules. We didn’t get a chance to fully explore the ideas generated and questions raised here, but I hope we will continue this conversation elsewhere online and offline. I also want to thank Sylvia for being the steward for this valuable community, SCoPE, and for getting us together here. Hope you all have a great summer. Cindy

For those who know Curt, I believe we can all agree that Curt is once again being his true self, generous with his ideas. Curt, you have given us many useful techniques to apply and much food for thought. My question is: Does CoI provide a framework to explain the list of things we know?

Cindy

Barb, you raise some important questions for us: What is the explanatory efficacy of CoI?  What are its theoretical underpinning and its assumptions? I really wish its three authors were here to help us understand. Unfortunate, we learned that none of them was available to join us. Related to your question, you also ask how does CoI help you understand your own behaviors in online discussion. I think this is a question that we can all attempt to answer, so let me redirect your question to all of us here and those who are listening in: Does CoI help you explain what you did in the past in online discussion – and if so, in what way? Knowing the framework, has it in any way guided you or informed how you conduct yourself in online discussion? 

Cindy

I'm not sure whether anyone sees the annotations/marginal notes Syvlia and I added to the posts. If you don't see them, select Shared Annotations from the dropdown list at the upper right corner. The annotation feature is buggy for Moodle 2.0, for example, the red boxes with an exclamation mark inside shouldn't be there, and a more serious bug - you can't delete an anotaton right now once it is created. However, it is convenient if you want to add a twitter-like comment on the side. We work on fixing the bugs as we discover them. 

Cindy

David,

Thank you for being the first to respond. In the seminar description, we said that “we hope to further our understanding of online discussion in particular, and online education in general.” I didn’t know how soon we will go beyond online discussion, now I know. Let me quote you:

“Clearly the environment we are currently using is an artifact of the old days in which online discussion formats began. It as if the world of the academic paper and online discussions forums of 2001 are mirrored here. I think our students expect more and would already be yawning in a discussion environment like this.”

I have a couple of reactions: First not everything old is out-of-date. You are not, of course, saying this, but you provoke a question – Do online discussion forums like this one still have a place in online education with today’s students? If so, what is it? Second, I agree that today’s students are expecting more, but more what? Technical features and tools? Interaction with teachers? Or more ways of interacting with teachers? What about more intellectual rigor? More time to study? More hard work?  Are these on their wish list?

No matter what the students expect, I’m with you on the need to meet them where they are. At the same time we need to bring them to places where we expect them to be and grow. I know you would agree that dialogue is essential part of learning, as Sylvia suggested in the marginal notes. Does this mean, at least sometimes, that they need to experience forums like this?

Cindy