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.

Common Craft - Online Community Strategies: What are the Differences Between message Boards and Weblogs?

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

Common Craft - Online Community Strategies: What are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?: "Weblog topics have comments and message board topics have replies. This subtle difference in syntax reveals a difference in the roles. The word comment for weblogs implies that the author does not need further participation to reach a goal- comment if you want. Reply, on the other hand, implies that participation is explicitly requested by the poster. A discussion is not a discussion without a reply."

But blogs can still be a community builder, can't they? And message boards can be just that--message boards. I'm not sure I agree 100% with Lee Lefever on this stuff. I think communities take different shapes and go through different kinds of interactions. Discussion and dialogue are one form of community connection, I think. But somehow I also believe that people who've all commented on the same thing--who've all shown an interest in that thing and made a connection through it--are somehow a community.

Still, this is a great article and contributes a lot to my thinking about online communities.

Arthur C. Clarke Gets It. Can We Figure It Out?

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

elearningeuropa.info: "Adult Learning and ICT": "'We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 -- and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?' (Clarke, Arthur C. The View from Serendip)"

Pleased to find this quote from one of my favorite authors included in this article on approaches to adulty learning. The article covers some of the basics about what we know regarding how adults learn, and why our approaches with them need to be different than they are with traditional college-age students.

My colleagues in continuing education at SNHU and I are having a discussion about how can we make our courses, adopted from the "day school" programs for traditional college-age students, more vital and relevant to adult students. Some of it is just good teaching instincts--many of our faculty (especially the aduncts) adapt their approach to make sure they are tapping into those qualities of adult learners that make them unique.

I think one of the benefits of using online tools for these learners is that these tools can make it easier to incorporate things like problem-based learning. Rich, broad, and deep conversations about real-world applications can flourish online. While good teaching instincts can help us develop some of these approaches, I think some course re-design is necessary to help create some models. Now where's that funding source to make this happen?

What Inspires Participation?

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

As I talked with my friend David K. today, he told me that he's become active in a review board of some sort or another in the town in which he and his family live. I asked him why he got involved and he said that it's because the issues the board is dealing with "have a direct impact on me and my family."

As we struggle to build communities online and to foster collaboration among students or employees, it's important, I think, to keep this in mind. It's the old idea of "WIIFM"--What's in it for me? All the talk about building online community seems to resist such a selfish notion, but the bottom line is that people will get engaged when there is a direct impact on them and their work, yes?

I'm reminded of Etienne Wenger's work on "communities of practice." I think that part of the idea is that such communities form around a common interest. But I think it's more than an interest--I think that people join communities of practice when they feel that there will be a payoff.

In creating online communities, whether for a class or for a group of co-workers, or just some sort of affinity group, we should keep in mind the need to articulate the payoff. Or maybe we just need to create the opportunity for participants to express what they want in terms of payoff?

Effective for Whom?

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

I'm reviewing this online course from University of Vermont called "Teaching Effectively Online," designed to help UVM faculty make the transition to online teaching. As I read the assignments and reflect on this idea of "teaching effectively," I struggle with the idea that "effective" means something very different depening on your context.

We lead instructors to read what others' have done--"read these 'best practices'," we tell them, "and you'll know what to do yourself." These "best practices" (I prefer the term "effective practices") are in all the articles and on all the web sites that we use as resources for this kind of thing (among them, the Sloan Consortium web site and Educause).

What I find lacking in these listings and descriptions of effective practices, though, are contextual descriptions and things to help the reader understand the circumstances under which the practice was effective. Even when the effective practices resource includes some contextual information, few tools are given to the reader to help them examine their own context in comparison and make some decisions about how to migrate the effective practice to their own environment.

For institutions, such contextual information might include student demographics, financial resources, staffing, etc. For faculty members, such contextual information includes content area, number of students, type of technological tools, teaching style. Without comparing these contextual factors--between the effective practice example and the target school or class--it's difficult to figure out how best to integrate the practice, and impossible to predict whether the practice can be successful.

What's needed is a set of tools that allows for more in-depth analysis of effective practices, and thoughtful planning for integration of such practices.

Walking Before We Can Run

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

Do we need to be using technology effectively in the day-to-day administration of the school--in student, faculty and staff transactions, etc.--before we can really effectively integrate technology into teaching? I think the answer is "yes," it seems I'm on the same page as the strategy folks at SNHU.

As part of a discussion regarding the schools strategic plan, one of the strategic objectives was outlined as doing a better job of making use of technology to support the administrative enterprise. As President LeBlanc pointed out, this kind of objective isn't really strategic--more operational--but if we don't get up to speed with the right software tools and availability of the right kinds of information online, we can't really move forward with a number of really strategic plans. One of these might be doing a better job of using technology for teaching.

What's the connection? For me, it's a cultural thing. If effective use of technology becomes part of the day-to-day activity of the school, a culture grows up around that. It's a culture of information and knowledge management, communication and collaboration. It's a culture that recognizes that technology can free us to spend more of our thinking and time on higher level activities rather than pushing papers. It's a culture that is less about force-feeding information through the pipeline and more about generating and creating information together.

This kind of cultural shift, I think, helps set the stage for truly effective use of technology in the academic enterprise. I'll have to be on the lookout for resources related to this and update this entry with links...

System Dynamics and Distance Learning

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

Fred Saba, of Distance-Educator.com, gave a presentation at last week's 20th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, reflecting back on 20 years of research in the field. I was intrigued to find out that Dr. Saba uses a system dynamics framework in his own research, and that he sees the fundamental system dynamics concept of a negative feedback loop as central to much of distance learning research in the last 20 years.

As one example of these dichotomies, he pointed to the idea of "transactional distance," developed by Michael Moore, explaining the negative feedback relationship between structure and independence (as structure goes up, learning independence goes down). He also talked about some other dichotomies: between instructor centeredness and learner-centeredness, between asynchronous and synchronous communication, etc.

Dr. Saba explained that the field now needs an overarching philosophy that brings the dichotomy of ideas together. Fascinating idea.

And all that talk of system dynamics got me to thinking about my plans for a doctorate--gotta get those applications going! Maybe I'll think about how to apply system dynamics to my research...

Learning Community at BBC

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

Absolutely inspired last week by a keynote address (at the 20th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning) by Nigel Paine, head of BBC People Development. Mr. Paine showed off an impressive set of online community and learning tools, including the BBC intranet (called "Gateway"). Elegantly, he pointed to the need for learning resources and tools to be embedded in the everyday work of employees.

He also made a point about online communities that echoed something I've been thinking (and saying, to anyone who'll listen)--that you can't just expect people to show up at an online community like an intranet. You have to remember that it's the everyday transactions and interactions that will draw people and create traffic--not necessarily big ideas, invitations to discuss topics, or even resources. He used the example of arranging taxicab pick-ups at BBC--a transaction that people conduct a lot and that the intranet facilitates.

Paine's presentation started with a viewing of the short film called 405 (not a BBC production). His point was that the challenge of creating a learning community at BBC is one of keeping young, energetic, creative people engaged while they grown and learn, because if they're not engaged they're likely not going to be patient enough to hang out until they're in the role they want to be in.

Inspiring!