Beth Cougler Blom

Well it's the end of Day 5 and we have a lot to celebrate! Sylvia and I have been so pleased about your engagement in the topic and activities this week. Thank you for all you have done (and may continue to do!)

Now's the time to think back on what you were able to accomplish this week for yourself. Did you come to appreciate the complexity of discussion prompts? What new ideas are you coming away with that you'd like to try out? What are you still mulling over that you'd like to continue to connect with colleagues about from this point forward?

The weekend is fast approaching and if you'd like to "spill over" a little bit into tomorrow or even Sunday, please do. You may have one or two things you'd still like to think through or craft. We'll do a last wrap up post by the end of the weekend when it seems to have gone still.

If you have any last minute resources you'd like to add to our collection - to help seed future versions of this Micro Course - please do! You can add them to the Open Forum and we'll integrate them into the Tips page later. (Any words of appreciation you'd like to share with your colleagues as we close our course community can be shared in the Open Forum too.)

Happy Friday everyone. Great work.

Thanks for voicing this fear Faith. I'm sure we've all felt this trepidation.

I'm wondering if the group has ideas to support how to effectively set the scene in order to feel more comfortable that you can ask more controversial discussion prompts. I think that even though controversy can be difficult, it could also lead to some pretty major 'aha' learning moments if handled well.

In the book, Design for How People Learn (by Julie Dirksen), she quotes Jonathan Haidt, who talks about the brain being like a rider and an elephant:

So Dirksen basically says that when designing learning we need to talk to the elephant to get learner's attention. (But I add on to this, we need to have some "rider control" in there somewhere so that students and faculty can feel and be safe in those discussions...)

One thing I could suggest is to do some sort of group agreements activity at the start of the course, having the group generate how they are going to work together and communicate with each other throughout the course.

Others may have more experience facilitating through conflict or controversy than I...does anyone else have something to offer up here?

I'm wondering if those weird food trends might give you some fodder for another way to approach this, just to offer up an alternative?

For example:

Give an example of a "weird" food trend going on right now in the world and why it may or may not meet the nutrition guidelines that we've discussed in our course. If someone posts a trend that you're particularly fond of, make a rebuttal! Give your reasons why it's not "weird" in your view.

Junko I really like this "give and get" sort of approach that you're working on here with this whole activity. It reminds me of the invitation question for the Impromptu Networking activity within Liberating Structures:

So it's a two-way street, it invites students into the discussion and tells them that they have something to share with each other. It builds community.

You might be able to use Moodle Workshop to accomplish peer voting. I haven't used this activity in Moodle myself, but RRU has a 'how to' around using Workshop it if you want to check it out. Of course, if you're not in Moodle there might be something else in your LMS - or a web-based voting tool?