Ending the Tyranny of Online Discussion

This post originally appeared in my blog Digital Amalgam, and was moved to this blog in July, 2007.

Something that's occurred to me during online teaching stints is that not everyone prefers to engage in developing knowledge by talking or discussing issues. This is why there are so many who never raise their hand in class. Are these people not learning? Well, maybe some of them aren't, but I suspect that many of them are. They're just processing information and building their knowledge in a different way.

I know there's all that stuff about the social construction of knowledge--Lev Vygotsky and all that. But does one really need to be a talker in order to learn? Is it possible that some talkers, and some discussion, actually create barriers to learning? I think so. And one of my great frustrations about teaching online is that, while I know online discussions are vital to building community and creating connections between and among students and facilitator, some people just won't get anything out of having to post to a discussion--these are people who feel oppressed (no, I don't think that's too strong a word) by online discussion and who we risk losing if we insist on forcing people to "talk" so much in online courses.

Unless... Maybe we can create discussion guidelines and rubrics that are more sensitive to different ways of processing information. I don't think I'm talking about Multiple Intelligences or Learning Styles here. I'm talking about different ways that people prefer to work with or process information and ideas. This processing is but one path to learning.

So what do I propose? A few years back, I experimented with an alternate model for discussions. Instead of having one rubric for discussion participation, I had four. I tried to recognize that people would have different approaches, and different strengths, in the discussion boards. This experimental model is by no means fully developed, but I described it to some faculty I'm teaching about online facilitation in a discussion board post the other night. I thought I'd share it here.

Please let me know, via the comments link below, what you think. If you decide you're going to give this, or some modified form of this, a try in your own teaching please drop me a note about how it goes. Let's find a way to end the tyranny of online discussion!

Subject: An Experimental Participation Model
Message no. 204 [Reply of: no. 201]
Author: Jim Woodell
Date: Monday, November 15, 2004 8:59pm

As an online instructor, I have also struggled with the
notion that not all students want to participate in the 
same way. However, I've also found that students need 
to be present in the online course and I've found the 
discussions an invaluable assessment tool (so much 
so that I've lightened up on other assignments and 
made participation a huge part of the grade).

But, I developed a model once that I hoped would 
addressthe issue that not everyone wants to 
participate by "talking." Unfortunately, much of my 
documentation of this model disappeared when I 
lost a hard drive, but it went something like this:

At the core of the model was the idea that there 
would be four different types of participation, and 
students should select one of the types based on how
they felt they would be most likely to engage with the 
content. Each type of participation had a rubric to 
provide students with characteristics of that type, and 
also an example or two.

The first type of participation was for the "talkers"--
people who liked to engage in conversation and who 
learned a lot through this kind of interaction. This type 
of participation looked very much like what we've done 
in this course--exchanges of messages, back-and-
forth and tying ideas together.

The second type of participation was for "thinkers"--
people who were more reflective and who liked to look 
at a lot of different ideas and consider their own 
perspective on those ideas. This kind of participation 
required students to go out and seek new ideas to 
introduce to the discussion. The ideas could be from 
web sites, articles, etc. They could even choose to 
highlight an idea that had been presented in an assigned 
reading or in the lecture notes, but that wasn't seeing the 
light of day in the discussion. Thinkers were not required 
discuss the ideas--only to post the ideas and to say how 
it changed their thinking. 

The third type of participation was for "workers"--people 
who were most engaged when they were trying to apply 
an idea or concept to their own experience. Again, these 
folks didn't have to get involved in the discussion, but 
they did have to post something to the discussion board. 
What they were asked to post was and example of how 
one of the concepts we were talking about had played 
out in their own experience--how it applied to them.

Finally, the fourth type of participation was for "lookers"
--people who liked to watch the trends and patterns of 
what others were talking about (or thinking, or working...) 
and to point out the trends and patterns. These folks were 
required to post analyses of the discussion or the course 
content, using tables or charts or simple outlines. 

That's the idea in brief. Unfortunately, I've not had a 
chance to test this but for a brief period of time in one 
of my courses. One thing I remember discovering was 
that, surprisingly to me, everyone ended up trying out all 
the different kinds of participation. Though some 
claimed to be solidly in one camp, they were often 
inspired to try the other participation modes.

Beyond Content

This post originally appeared in my blog Digital Amalgam, and was moved to this blog in July, 2007.

...and beyond teaching?

Yesterday, I said that I thought that too much emphasis does seem to be placed on getting the content out there and not enough, perhaps, on the teaching or facilitation around that content. While I think there's no replacement for a good teacher to help someone progress through their learning, Derek Morrison at the Auricle blog introduced me to a different way of thinking about the "content problem" that Sebastian Fiedler wonders about.

Auricle: "But we all know (don't we?) that a load of content online, no matter how prestigious the source, does not e-learning make; a fact recognized by David Wiley's Open Learning Support (OLS) project, a pilot research project launched last April in collaboration with MIT."

As I said, it's not the content that makes MIT. Then I said, "it's the teaching." Well, that was probably a simplification. It's the teaching and learning. And while we can't re-create the MIT experience around it's content, the Open Learning Support project fascinates me as a way to at least create some additional, and I think needed, piece of the puzzle--a learning community. What a great idea to create an open space where those folks who want to take advantage of the MIT content can also engage with other learners!

We educational progressivists like to tout the notions of learner-centered classrooms and constructivism, and maybe this project, with its "self-organizing" learning communities will end up showing just how powerful such ideas can be. But will these open communities really take us not just beyond content but also beyond the need for teaching?

I don't think so. Derek also references Gilly Salmon's 5-stage model, suggesting (I think) that this kind of progression may be missing in some of the OLS project communities. In order for a learning community to advance, it needs someone to tend it. It may be that effective self-organizing learning communities can be successful if someone (or a few someones) in the community take on a facilitative role.

But it does feel to me like content plus community are still not quite enough. Facilitation seems to me to be key. I'm eager to see what the OLS tells us about this!

From Seblogging: Do we have a content problem?

This post originally appeared in my blog Digital Amalgam, and was moved to this blog in July, 2007.

Thumbing through my blog clippings this morning, came across this post on Sebblogging back in July:

Seblogging: "So, I keep asking myself: what is wrong with you? everybody else seems to be really concerned about quality content and its delivery... what kind of distorted mental world are you living in?"

Sebastian goes on to quote Oleg Liber and his article Cybernetics, e-learning and the education system:

"higher learning is concerned with worldviews, with the acquisition of the concepts and distinctions of a discipline, its discourse; and this is best learnt through practice, though engaging in the discourse. This requires a form of cognitive apprenticeship [25], where a rich conversational engagement between learners and teacher can take place; it cannot be achieved just through the learning of facts."

This made me think of a lesson I learned when I started work at SNHU--I hope I can take parts of this lesson with me to my new job at NSCC. What I discovered when I got to SNHU, where hundreds of course sections are served up online each year, was that there was virtually no course/content development going on--instructors were handed a syllabus and an empty course shell in Blackboard. Importantly, though, instructors are given significant training in using Blackboard's discussion tools and a huge emphasis is placed on how to create that discourse that's so vital.

It does seem to me that most schools have a content problem--they get so wrapped up in how the content is going to be presented that they forget that what really matters is how that content is taught. People I've talked to are scratching their heads about the Open CourseWare project at MIT--why would they want to give away all that content? Well, it's not the content that makes MIT--it's the teaching.

The internet does indeed give us some amazing tools for discourse. Can we shift our emphasis in course development and delivery toward that end of the spectrum?

Going Wide or Going Deep? Blogs or Discussions as Pedagogical Tools

This post originally appeared in my blog Digital Amalgam, and was moved to this blog in July, 2007.

Michael Feldstein tripped across Cole Complese's blog for his class, and mused on the possibilities of the blog for class discussion.

From Michael's e-Literate blog: "I’d like to see a unified tool that enables the professor to choose display and permissions settings based on pedagogical goals. For example, if you kept the blog display (i.e., showing the full text of all starter posts in chronological order) but reversed the permissions, so that any student could post to the main blog level but only the professor could post replies, then you’d have something like a Q&A or FAQ interface."

I really, really like the idea of either discussion tools or blog tools that give the instructor some ability to manipulate display based on pedagogy. I'll have to do some thinking about what this might look like if the instructor wanted, say, problem-based learning to be happening. Could the instructor have the display organize posts by steps in a problem-solving process?

And I know that the goal isn't always discussion. Some instructors have a tough time imagining how "discussion" can be used effectively to have students work through their content. I'm pretty confident that discussion can be used for just about any topic, but sometimes the goal is not discussion. And it doesn't have to be discussion to be social meaning-making, either, in my view. Those of us reading each other's blogs are engaged in social meaning-making without necessarily being engaged in discussion.

But here's my thought about Cole's class blog: it doesn't seem to be about discussion for me--students only seem to post one comment per blog entry, and it's hard for it to be about discussion if everyone's just saying one thing. But the other thing that I notice is that it doesn't seem to be about depth to me--there's a lot of territory covered in these comment posts, but is it going deep? is it possible to go deeper and not just "wallow in the shallows" if you're not really facilitating a discussion?

Or maybe depth isn't the goal, either.

Thanks, Michael, for giving me lots more to chew on with regard to discussions versus blogs as pedagogical tools.

Diablogging: Reflective AND Social Sense-Making Through Blogs

This post originally appeared in my blog Digital Amalgam, and was moved to this blog in July, 2007.

Sebastian Fiedler wrote a couple of items recently about "Webpublishing as a reflective conversational tool." He concludes one recent entry:
"By explicating some of the 'phrases' we set in a verbal, retrievable, archived, and accessible way on a global network we appear to gain one more tool to 'discover the bases for likenesses and differences,' " reflecting on writing of one George Kelly.

In another entry of Sebastian's, he details his views on the idea of a reflective conversational tool.

I'm intrigued by what Sebastian has to say, but I can't help but think that the idea has to extend beyond "reflection" and into the realm of social sense-making. It seems to me that Blogs can and should serve as social sense-making tools, too. I'm certain that Stephen Downes must have some thoughts about this, and will have to go digging through his stuff about educational uses of blogs.

Earlier today, I created a new blog in which I want to offer advice about online teaching. I don't, however, want this to be one-way advice column, so I invite others to make it a "diablog" by contributing comments to my pieces of advice. I was pretty proud of that word--"diablog"--but of course have since learned that it's not all that original. A Google search for the word turns up 3,500 hits. So I guess this idea is out there--the use of a Blog for exchanging ideas, not just espousing them.

Earlier in the week, I responded to a blog article by Lee Lefever at CommonCraft on the differences between message boards and Weblogs. My read of the article was that Lefever doesn't see Blogs as social in the way that message boards are. I think they can be, though he's right that they are differently social.

In any case, I'm just doing some internal dialog here. Trying to tease out the idea of a Blog as a social meaning-making space. Of course, it can only be social if someone reads and responds. Anyone there? Care to share your thoughts? Click "comments" below!

It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age

This post originally appeared in my blog Digital Amalgam, and was moved to this blog in July, 2007.

This article poses an interesting way of thinking about the development of work-related social networks. What most interests me about the idea of "intensional networks" presented by the author is the notion that these networks are "ego-centric"--entirely driven by an individual's needs and their own development of connections. Since part of my work involves trying to get faculty in various disciplines to come together and share resources, these "ego-centric" idea caught my eye...

From the conclusion of It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age: "The reduction of corporate infrastructure means that instead of reliance on an organizational backbone to access resources via fixed roles, today's workers increasingly access resources through personal relationships. Rather than being embraced by and inducted into 'communities of practice,' workers meticulously build up personal networks, one contact at a time."

This is true in academe as well as the corporate world. Especially at a school like the one I work at, Southern New Hampshire University, which relies on the work of a lot of adjuncts. And the adjuncts working in distance education are far flung.

So finding ways to help instructors "build up personal networks, one contact at a time" seems to be an important part of our strategy to foster communities among our adjunct and full-time instructors, within and across disciplines.

The Librarian and the Instructor

This post originally appeared in my blog Digital Amalgam, and was moved to this blog in July, 2007.

We've just begun discussing ways we can get our librarian involved helping our online instructors get students oriented to all of the resources that are available to them through the online databases and such. Far too many of our students report in evaluations that they don't even know the library resources exist. Knowing about those resources is important to helping students' complete research and work of quality and substance.

I tripped across the article linked above, and quoted here:

Embedding online information resources in Virtual Learning Environments: some implications for lecturers and librarians of the move towards delivering teaching in the online environment: "if the librarian is to impact upon this new environment it seems that he or she may need to heed Burge's advice (2002) to, 'introduce yourself as an innovation to make their (lecturers') lives easier and their academic reputations bigger.'"

There's definitely another role that can be played when the librarian meets the instructor--helping to vet the online resources that the instructor has chosen. If only we can set up that consultation in a way that makes it feel like the introduction of an innovation.

There's one other objective we'd like to reach with the librarian consultation--educating students and instructors about plagiarism and what's okay (and not okay) when citing other people's work. But that's a topic for another blog entry.