Beth Cougler Blom

Hilarious, Gina! Are you a sci-fi fan perhaps? Love it.

Like the idea of the random image generator too.

I made one for you! I figured Adobe Spark might be a fun tool to do this with, so I used my desktop (also possible on tablet) to make one for you. What do you think? Was this the kind of thing that you were thinking about?

https://spark.adobe.com/video/lY1tDLRzfkFCK

If you're curious, here was my process:

• I went to the Five Card Flickr site URL you gave above and tried to get photos that way, but I found it sort of difficult to save the photos onto my desktop in order to be able to bring them into Adobe Spark. The 'save as photo' function (right click on mouse) didn't seem to be working for some reason. And when I clicked into the photo itself and tried to go back to the Five Card Flickr photo site to find the rest of the photos I chose, it didn't work. So I eventually gave up on Flickr and went right over to Adobe Spark.
• I know how to use Adobe Spark so there was no learning curve there really, just remembering how to use it. It's pretty intuitive though. I had to think about how to get random photos in there. So I typed in the word 'random' and of course things came up, but a whole class couldn't type the same word, I figured, because they might get the same photos. So I typed in the words, 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four' and 'five' and I chose the first image that came up. (Adobe Spark allows you to pull in Creative Commons images within their system.)
• This means that if students were going to use the photos available for embedding right within Adobe Spark, they might need to use a random word generator tool alongside it, or choose a structure to use to find images before they go into Spark. For example, 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd' and 'e' OR 'do', 're', 'mi', 'fa', 'so', OR 'violet', 'indigo', 'blue', 'green', 'yellow' (colours of the rainbow order), and so on.
• Other details: With Adobe Spark you can record the audio per each page, so that was easy. It didn't take me long to come up with a story. I didn't script anything. I only had to re-record the first slide, because I had made an awkward pause. The re-recording process for one page is super easy.

(Edited by Sylvia Currie - original submission Thursday, 1 November 2018, 12:34 PM - embedded Beth's Adobe Spark story. It appears something has changed and ability for participants to embed iframe has been taken away! Will look into it.)

Janna, I really like FlipGrid as well, but when I developed FLO Synchronous I used FlipGrid because I didn't want as many introductions (because it's only a three week course). I had noticed that people often put a first video about themselves in, but it is rarer for them to do reply videos. So FlipGrid seemed a good tool to use when I didn't want an introductions activity to take over the first week of the course. (Introductions activities in forums can be so robust, and almost too much so if you're trying to move on to other things!)

So all this is to say that if I use FlipGrid again where I really DO want a lot of community-building, I might have to think about asking students to contribute several videos to it. Maybe theme two or three "waves" of Flipgrid videos with different prompts...to try to get them to use it more and reply to others more. (For example, Wave 1: Where did you come from, Wave 2: Where are you now?, Wave 3: Where are you going?)

Sharing my thinking on this with you in case you end up using it in an online course too. Good luck with it!

I've never evaluated community building activities per se but those kinds of student posts might roll up into a contribution/participation grade I give in the credit course I teach, so I might be watching and somewhat evaluating participating in seemingly ungraded activities. For example, in my workplace innovation course I teach, I ask people to introduce themselves after watching the Mindsets videos from designkit.org, and talk about which mindsets they connect with, etc. I do find the students do like to do this activity, and I know they connect with it because they continue to talk about and refer back to mindsets quite a bit later in the course.

One thing I was thinking about, however, is about the things that we may NOT see our students doing to attempt to build community for themselves. For example, in an online course I co-facilitated (I think it might have been a Moodle skills online course at RRU), one of the participants (a faculty member at RRU) said that she had put up all our names and faces on the wall in her office, to help her connect with each of us. I think she used our Moodle profile photos to do this. So she visibly created a sort of 'course community wall' around her to help her to get to know us better. I may be making this up (it was a couple of years ago at least) but I think she may even have filled out a few details about us on our "profiles" on her wall, things that we had said in our course introductions.

In that scenario I just described, I wouldn't have know that my student was doing this if she hadn't have told me. So perhaps we should be giving our students ideas about things that they can do on their own to help build course community...as well as things they can do with the rest of us...?

Beth

It has been great to think about!

I tried this activity out so you could see what a "student" might come up with. It was fun and a bit introspective, which was great.

For example, I didn't foresee the 'name mug' comment coming up in my thinking until I got thinking about the origin of my name and broadening out from there. It got me thinking about, "Well in whose culture does it mean what?" There isn't just one meaning of a name across the world so now I realize I'm a little bothered by companies printing on mugs THE meaning of a name! So weird and ethnocentric when you think about all those name products out there that you can buy. Anyway, I digress! :-)