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.