Derek Chirnside

Hi Bev.

This arrived in my mail 20 minutes ago as we wrapped up a 2 week discussion on e-learning policy . . .

Those who followed the discussion from the last fortnight may be interested in an ITForum discussion (based in the US), called “Who killed e-learning?” There are some themes closely related to what was discussed. Instructions for subscribing to ITForum are at http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/upcoming.html. The discussion paper (PDF) can be found at http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Cronje101/Whokillede-learning.pdf.

Is this you behind this?

-Derek

Emma, I think this is part of a question we really have not got deep enough answers on yet:  The dynamic inside out heads and in our corperate identity on the difference between forums/discussions boards and blogs.  This is complicated by many factors:
*some software that alters the view instantly.  (Like in Interact, our system, you can change a number and the blog is viewed identically to a threaded forum, just like you describe)
*Assessed of not.  :-)
*purpose of the activity.  eg forums seem to be better for coming to group consensus.
*useability quirks

I was looking at this over the weekend.
Here are some links:
1. http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/2004/08/blogs-and-bulletin-boards.htm
2. [ASIDE- Wikis and blogs!!  ??  Complications from new software: " A bliki (also known as a wikiLog, wog, wikiWeblog, wikiblog, or bloki)" . . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliki]

In my opinion it has partly to do with the nature of the surrounding interaction: whether this is a transmission model or a knowledge sharing/construction model, whether it is individual or group/collaborative, the purpose of the interaction.  But I think there are deeper commfort issues in our minds we have yet to fathom.  Why is it that one little group (10 Y2 Sociology students say) just take off and it's wonderful and a similar group down the campus just flounder??  (The facilitator maybe?  The setup?  The time of year - blogs at exam time jost don't work!!  but in week ne of the semester -. . .  ??)

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Nancy again. "Online community has been an important part of the Internet, mainly forming around email lists, bulletin boards and forums. In recent years, the ascendancy of blogs has introduced a new platform for communities. This article looks at some of the emerging patterns of blog based communities and raises some questions for their strategic application."  A year ago the jury was still out: can blogs, or a constellation of blogs create community?  I thinkt he answer is now a resounding yes.  Under certain circumstances.  And learning is in there somewhere.  Some of the courses I have to deal with have hit on the magic sweet spot and blogs take off.  I have some tentative conclusions, but more analysis is needed.

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Mathemagenic's Lilia Efimova:

I'm taking another look on the work on weblog conversations we did with Aldo de Moor in 2004 (Beyond personal webpublishing: An exploratory study of conversational blogging practices). Then we did a manual analysis of a single conversation between multiple weblogs and proposed a number of characteristics of conversational blogging practices.

Since then many things changed. Not only there is much more research on all weblog things, but also now there are more tools to do weblog analysis. For my dissertation I want to use weblog analysis tools developed by Anjo (an overview - Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example) to extend the analysis to more conversations. (snip

I'm pretty sure (based on non-systematic observation ;) that blogging practices have changed from 2004, most likely in respect to the following things (mainly those affecting linking between weblog posts that is at core of our definition of a weblog conversation):

• Relations between people have evolved and many conversations are moving from weblogs to other media. An example of that is in my paper with Andrea, but I guess many longer-term bloggers could tell similar stories.
• Number of (relevant) weblogs have expanded, so reading practices of some people have changed (do you read weblogs of others as closely and as consistently as in 2004? I don't.)
• Large scale introduction of tagging and evolution of categorisation-related features of weblog tools might have changed practices of organising one's thinking in a weblog, so there is less need to rely on linking to one's own posts.

Other issues with the dataset:

• The community membership is defined in some (attempting to be objective, but far from perfect) way. Some members are probably missing, others do not necessary belong to the community if defined in other ways (e.g. based on topical analysis).
• We have only weblog posts (and not comments) in the dataset, which limits the analysis (e.g. we can't do a proper comparison with the conversation analysed in the paper with Aldo, which included weblog posts and comments).
• Some conversations may span boundaries of a community, so those will not be discovered or will be "truncated".

As a little whimsical aside, Lila has recently become a mother, and has in her blog these superb posts on KM, life and blogging: mixed in with advice to feeding mothers. 

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Commoncraft has a post on comparing blogs and discussion boards.

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Web Dawn has a cool blog: click to display it as a forum.  :-)  (But for an old conservative for me, It's not quite there yet . . .)

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I'm thinking hard about thjis at the moment.
Any further links and connections to artlicles are welcome . . .

I apologise for the LONG post.  I don't have time now to write briefer.  Yet.
-Derek

Colby, I think many of us have had similar experiences.  I nearly pulled my boy out of the school he was in last year for this very reason.  The school is really good if you 'sit down, shut up and do what you are told'.  But they were at war with my son otherwise.

For creativity: I have never put this as a criteria in assessment in High School projects I used to run.  I have this vague sense it was like assessing 'intelligence' and was uneasy about this.  Now that I think about it I have not really thought about it properly.

You said: "Creativity is actually the ability to identify and organise relationships into new concepts - creativity is not about the ability to draw."

This is very helpful.  I know kids who can draw, but are not really creative in the sense of doing new things, synthesis, connecting etc.  They are the kind of artist who will do well in an architects' firm formalizing someone else's brief.  This in contrast to a kid who can see a bottle and a glass on the table and think "The glass would look good balanced on the bottle".  @#$%^&

What I was rubric creating in the past I'd have "Evidence of original thinking" as a facet.  Sort of "I know it when I see it"  :-)  [I get the feeling if I read these theorist you talk about a whole new world would open up]

In my HS teaching days, what I found was this:

1. I don't like assessing these things.
2. But I did assess - to highlight the skills, reward where I could . . .
3. And I think students found themselves taken into new places they may not have gone because of this, even if it was not natural to them.
   ie do 2 things: stretch them into uncomfortable areas.  Let them have opportunity in the things they are good at.
4. Regularly (not enough to bore them) talk about learning, engagement, comfort, discomfort . .
   
5. - - - > Active learning I hope.
   

Coming to my vague ill defined point: I think it takes effort to help students become active learners.  I wonder what the difference is online?

-Derek
Another Good discussion Deidre.  I'm not really engaging with everything.  Just dipping in once a day.  There are LOTS of things interesting to think about in these posts . . . .

The thing about tagging is that there are no RIGHT answers - at least in one respect.  Poor tags (in that they lack shared meaning) just kind of fade away.  In this respect, some students of a particular disposition do find this hard.  Two things I observe:

1. They want things 'right'.  They can be then very tentative in doing it.
   
2. They want their tags to be used or at least not ignored and they can feel bad.  :-)

IMO, this is an area that could be researched.

OK - you are unsure about what to call something.  I say: 1) does this mean you are unsure about it and need to do more thinking? or 2) is there several possible tags that may fit? or even 3) can you create links no-one has made before?  The idea (as I see it) that tagging is sort of self correcting, and initially the more tags the better.

I'm now going to contradict myself.  A scenario: person X tags a case study that is patently Behaviouristic/direct instruction with a constructivist tag.  What do we do?  ie some tags are wrong.  :-)  I'm trying to manage the collaborative side of things to smooth this out - and building in a critical evaluative feedback loop.  Sometimes we succeed.  :-)


This is learning my modelling, and immersion - just what we mean by ACTIVE.  "Try and be helped."  superb.  Yes and Yes.


'Forget'.  ''Inconsistent.  Point taken.  A good tagging application WILL assist with this.  IMO: we all have this to some extent, just press on through.

Dewey was NOT tagging.  Consider a book on Madagascar.  Does it go in travel, history or geography?  It can only go in one place.  Tags have only one pile of items, but multiple tags per item.  Tagging arose because of the failure of taxonomies to meet our needs.  There is lots written on this, like Clay Shirky's article http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html  (I don't totally understand this article, but it is interesting to read.  He says: taxonomies don't work.

"struggle with tagging"  quite understandable.  How can our puny pea brains really manage all the ideas and concepts we deal with in the level of subtly needed.  BUT IMO, tagging helps us order to the extent we are ready for just our little intersection with the great fuzz ball of ideas.


Hmm.  I'd have thought "Folksonomies are corperate"  "Shared set" - yes.

I think this is cool: folksonomies used to really push thinking in a formal taught course, with little real need to drive students.  It's a world they can enter into.  Active learning in a real and meaningful context, taking stuff as quantumbrands said, into their work lives . . .

I'm not sure if this is a facilitator's type question or not Deidre.  This setting described here is ideal for a course.  Just provide some nice scaffolding, some good collaborative tools, and go for it.

This is in fact where I cut my teeth online.  "Real World Problem Solving", a Masters course at the University of Canterbury in 1997.  Based on the NTEN teacher development programmes run out of Montana State Uni (Bozeman) and run mainly online.

The first time is still vivid in my mind.

Our lecturer called himself a "Kiwi Wannabe, and had bought a batch near Charleston (a little piece of paradise on our West Coast).  We got some plans etc, and the first problem was:


I can remember surfing the net to read up specs from pumps, considering human operated, solar powered, push pumps, suck pumps and pipe material.  We could ask any questions we wanted.  We worked on this problem over about three weeks.  John Eyles teaches design somewhere up north here: drafts, showcases, feedback, mulling, incubation, guest experts and guest non experts (like your mother) are all part of the equation.

There are technology classes her who do "Design a breakfast food", "design a cookie" and have tastings and feedback where results are entered online.  In our course we did breakfast food habit surveys in three continents via friends on the internet.

As a side note: in my course we looked at creative processes, design processes etc etc first, then did the stuff, and spent serious time analysing the actual processes in our four projects afterwards.  This was beneficial as well - and the processes are somehow caught in the online environment.  The online environment ("First Class" at that time) provided the scaffolding and structure - but there was a LOT of free wheeling inside that.

I have an opinion here: lots of LMS, CMS systems provide TOO MUCH rigidity and structure.  The social software apps I think would provide a better (More 'creative'??) setting.  I'm at the moment looking for some projects for next year inside courses at work to test this.  I'm thinking aloud here.  Two things: a tight linear structure imposed by a teacher can still ruin a class in a nice online environment.  A tight linear controlled environment will not lock down the teaching of a creative teacher.