Marsha West

I'd like to hear more about this Sylvia. How does it work? Who would be able to use it? Etc.

Hi, I'm Marsha West. I do online facilitation, usually in the area of K12 teacher professional development. I don't know much at all about podcasting, and have just arrived at this seminar. (I've actually been on a month-long vacation with almost no online access! First time in many years I've actually been really disconnected from the internet.)

I live and work in a very remote area of Washington State -- the Olympic Peninsula. I have had lots of questions about the uses and value of podcasting, and reading through the various threads of this discussion today has been a real eye-opener for me. I must confess that I'd assumed it would be just an extension of the lecture platform, but I am quite intrigued about the many other possibilities for this technology, especially in regard to collaborative work among students.

It's nice to see many familiar names/faces here -- Nancy Riffer, Sarah Haavind, Sylvia Currie, et al . . . now that I'm plugged back into my DSL, I'll keep up better with what's happening in SCoPE.

~~marsha

Marsha West here in Western Washington State.

I'm surprised to see so many familiar names and hear so many familiar voices here. I don't know a lot about "informal learning" in any "formal sense." (That is an oxymoron, isn't it?) But, of course, we all participate in informal learning all the time -- I'm just trying to get the sense of what it means to this campfire group.

I've been following this conversation for the past several days and am fascinated by what I'm "hearing." I'm the one wrapped up in a blanket just quietly listening in back there in the shadows on the edge of the campfire.

I don't have anything to offer here at this point, but I'm thinking as I listen. I was talking to a colleague in California the other day - and he was talking about a wish to set up some sort of informal space in which new teachers could talk with retired teachers - sort of an informal mentoring situation in which problems could be shared and strategies be offered. Would that fall into the area of informal learning? Since it would be voluntary - and learner directed?? I'm not sure about definition of terms, etc . . . . so just thinking . . . .

Thanks for inviting me to join in, Paul! It was a fascinating conversation!

~~marsha

Paul had invited me last week to join in this discussion, but I was not sure whether folks in this discussion, who are mostly academics, would be interested in a K12 based contribution. So I've just been reading along the past few days; I am especially interested in what Sarah has to say about discussion as collaborative work.

That's what made me decide to jump in and share something from my archives.

Let me explain where I'm coming from. I was one of the "charter members" of the Virtual High School faculty. I wrote and taught a year long course that was actually an adaptation of the AP English Literature and Composition course I'd taught for many years in the regular f2f classroom. We called it WebQuest: a Literary Odyssey. (This was before we were hearing about a structured activity called a Webquest.) It's really about going with Odysseus on a literary quest through time to see how literature shows human beings trying to make sense out of the world.)

I taught the course for six years. It was an amazing journey for me -- I learned a lot from my students as they learned from each other without any face-to-face contact. And what I learned is that I was a better teacher, delivered a better course, and got better results from my students than in all of the 20+ years preceding that experience.

Now about collaboration: Grasping concepts and deepening understanding -- of, say, literature -- isn't a product in the same way that making a video together or creating a group power-point is. But it is, it seems to me, a very valuable work product - and a more important goal to me than the more tangible artifacts that happened along the way -- the small group projects like web pages or power points or "hyperstudio" presentations. What happened in the discussions was, to me, the most important work of all.

I have some "artifacts" of my own in my files from one particular year of VHS.

The attached word document is a collection of unedited, verbatim excerpts of student writing from my course database.

I chose the bits I did because I see connections between what they are saying and what I am reading in this conversation about collaboration.

I'd be interested to see whether any of the rest of you see.

Do you see authentic collaboration as it's being defined here? a work-product? Do you see illustrations of what Sarah had to say in her recent posts?