Sylvia Riessner

Wow, some great ideas to think about in this thread.

Beth, thanks for sharing your intro activity - I love the idea of using these videos to think about mindsets. And that people naturally thought about them as they moved through the course. I've tucked that away in my virtual backpocket.

And the story about the unseen community participation of the learner who mapped her peers onto a wall. We've used the Participants list (and profile images) in the northern project I'm involved with as the teleconference calls often involve a fair number of participants across 4 timezones and it seems to help them to imagine who is speaking (and listen better) with the visual prompt.

In terms of mapping participation, when I've facilitated FLO I sometimes (twice ;-)  used a free mindmapping tool on my iPad (SimpleMind) to show me connections between me and the learners (thanks to Beth for the inspiration about actually tracking what I do each week in terms of touching base or taking a look at how each participant is doing! - I had always presumed I did that naturally but I realized I had sometimes lost track of how a learner was doing).

Initially this was from my perspective - what I was doing to help the learning but it quickly shifted to map the interconnections between (among) learners. The mindmapping tool made it easy to add quick notes if the interactions resulted in an interesting conversations or 'nuggets' that I might want to tease out further etc. It really did provide clarity about the way the online community was evolving. I wish I could share one but my iPad is so old that I can't access the maps anymore and they aren't available on other platforms.

Personally, I don't believe in or value assigning marks for participation (as a way to encourage participation). Part of that is because I don't teach credit courses per se, but I really think they are unfair unless the participation requirement is defined and measured by a specific activity or action (not based on number of posts in a forum, or number of words).

Colleen, I appreciated you raising the issue of 'quiet' students. When I took my first online courses, I was definitely one of those. And I know that some of my online learners may not visibly participate because they come from different cultures (who value different ways of learning) or because they personally don't see the value of doing so.

And back to Colleen's original question "Other than by creating super engaging activities, how do you encourage participation in your community building activities?" I think that we may be focusing too much on community building if that's the focus of engaging students. As long as they learn what they need and what is most meaningful to them (and achieves the stated outcomes for success in the course) then, isn't that more important? While I may believe that they could have learned more, better, with a deeper or broader understanding, I also think that sometimes they have so many other important things going on in their lives, that they not be able to engage at the level I might think optimal.

Wow, we go back a ways eh?

Thanks for sharing that image from Alan's presentation. I should see if his open blog tool he built for TRU is still around - that could be another shared activity - and I have pics from when he shared it at ETUG with Brian Lamb.

And constraining the random 5 images might make it more interesting as the diversity of reflections could be revealing? Looking forward to having a chance to try...finally!

I like the idea of having them build a story person by person, image by image. The challenge is in finding a tool that easily allows people to add images to same space with text AND for all participants to be able to do it easily.

I had thought at one point I could host an activity like this on Padlet but sometimes the upload of images is slow and many participants are still confused by the concept of resizing images to make them easier to share.

Still a good idea though - thx.

I've been wanting an opportunity to use this activity in an online course for years! It's been tucked away in my (One day I will... file).

Here's a rough draft - any suggestions for improvement would be appreciated!

Sharing Stories - Building Community

Intended purpose: to initiate (build) a sense of community among participants who are all pursuing courses within a shared program; this activity would be offered during the initial introductory foundation course that they all take. After this course, they may all take different courses, fully online or blended offerings, at different times over a two year period. My hope is that they would have fun and get to know each other enough to make them want to stay connected in other ways that are offered during the program.

What?  I chose to use Cogdog (Alan Levine's) Five Card Flickr open licensed activity. I selected the ds106 option. This is a digital "gamified" version of an activity you may have seen done in face-to-face workshops or conferences. Participants are offered a pre-selected number of images (or they have a chance to select a certain number within a limited time). Their challenge is to imagine a story that connects the often disparate images. Sharing their stories helps to build their understanding of each other (often through laughter!)

Things to consider:  Suitable for an online or blended course offering. For the online activity, learners would have to be comfortable with basic web browser skills, and have a fairly good internet connection and relatively recent computer and web browser. If any learner found the online activity too challenging, the trainer could easily create an alternate assignment and share as a downloadable document or even send via snail-mail. Learners could be encouraged to be creative in how they told their story - as long as whatever story they told could be shared with their peers.

Alternate option:  Use the Five Card Flickr search to perform a random sort and then download several selected sets to produce different documents.  The images could be resized, grouped and added to a Word or editable PDF document so participants could complete as they choose. 

Disclaimer:  This is a new try for me (haven't had an opportunity to test it on my intended victims (oops, I mean audience ;-)

Tasks: (what I need to do before offering)

• Find a 'hook' or way to awaken creative instincts - make it fun. Share some funny, poignant examples. Roll a virtual dice to determine who gets to try first (if I'm able to get them started in a synchronous online session?)
• Provide a checklist that includes a direct link "Are you ready to play Five Card Flickr" and sets a timeframe and explains how to submit to a shared space.
  
  • If they're comfortable sharing their story in the open, they can submit to the Five Card Flickr site and share a link back into the course discussion forum.
  • If they're not, they can save the images to their desktop and build the story there or in an online page you provide that can be shared with other members of the course.
• Set a date for final storytelling submission - allow a few days thereafter and encourage them to read each others and share comments. You may want to provide some simple guidelines for comments.
• Provide a summary or share highlights along the way - this helps to keep learners thinking about the activity - even if they're not actually logged into the course site.
• Encourage learners to share what they enjoyed (or might change) about the activity for future classes.

Tiny but MIGHTY!  Appreciated the thoughtful comments, supportive posts, and the amazing quality and quantity of ideas and resources.

Thanks to Jacquie and Bettina, and SylviaC of course!

Cheers

SylviaR