If you’re not familiar with it yet, ds106 has been doing all kinds of innovative and creative things when it comes to extending the online learning space. And today, I spotted another one of their creative samplings — this one for sparking student interest in one of their future learning adventures.
Via Not[Trivial]
You can find more info here.
When Web 2.0 first started to catch fire among faculty teaching online, the widespread assumption was that the NetGen students would be extremely adept at using the tools because they used them all the time to connect with their friends, check out new music and videos, and so on. But some recent research has been chipping away at this assumption (e.g., Digital Learners not Digital Natives and Not so techno-savvy).
Continuing this trend is a story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. on researchers from the Community College Research Center at Columbia’s Teacher College who looked at students taking online classes from various community colleges in Washington state. One of the key take-aways was how this assumption overlooks the factor of socio-economics:
People assume this generation is super-technologically sophisticated, but that’s not necessarily true, especially in the community-college population, which tends to be low income, disadvantaged …
Last Christmas, I had a little time to catch up on some novels and so I downloaded Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom to my iPhone. Unfortunately life intervened and I didn’t have a chance to finish it, but it jumped back to the top of my To-Read list after just finishing Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U. Part of her book describes how people use social networks (or social networking practices) to hack their own educational experiences and in the process of doing this, she gives a shout-out to Doctorow’s Magic Kingdom.
Cory Doctorow described an entire economy that ran on whuffie, a reputation-based currency.
With this Sci-Fi vision in mind, Kamenetz then follows this up with an interesting question that relates to motivation and the design of online learning contexts:
What if there was a way for students to start building whuffie from their first class, freshman year?
I like this more incremental and holistic approach, because especially when I think about collaboration in online learning, it’s often difficult to expect students to form and establish cohesive groups with people they’ve likely never met and more significantly, for projects that are confined to a traditional 16-week term. If students began building online identities and reputations (whuffie) early on in their collegiate experience, then ideally, teachers could think about how collaborative designs could be linked to that existing network.
We all know the 2.0 buzz words (or clichés depending on your level of cynicism) … blogs, tags, wikis and podcasting. But some of these are easier to execute than others. Podcasting and screencasting can be two that definitely require more time and effort (if you want to do them well, anyway).
For the Mac users out there, it’s looking like the next version of OS X is going to make podcasting quite a bit easier. 9to5Mac gives a glimpse of what may be happening with the upcoming Podcast Publisher. If its final final form surfaces as described, one feature that might especially capture instructors’ attention is the split screen, where students could view demo actions as well as their teacher’s friendly mug. This rich combo could certainly do a lot to boost social presence.
One other thought … added ease of use to this tool also makes it ideal for encouraging more student-generated podcasts. (Who says teachers should have all the fun?) With all that goes into making a good podcast, it seems like there’s plenty of potential for rich, authentic learning experiences.
One of the many interesting educational trends that has attracted a fair bit of attention as a result of Web 2.0 tools is what’s simply referred to as, Informal learning. Despite the rather generic term, it’s generated interest among learning researchers because it looks at what drives people to learn without the formal structure of a class or training session.
Lifehacker has a nice example of this with their Lifehacker Night School series. In this series (which is free), they’re reaching out to people who want to know what’s happening under the software hood, but feel a little overwhelmed about exactly where to begin. Beyond the videos, Adam Dachis (the author of the tutorial) has corresponding posts that expand on some of the major points and define key terms. So if you’re feeling the need to release the inner nerd in you, go check it out.
Read a good article by Terry Anderson, Bruno Poelhuber, and Ross McKerlichon on using social software in distance education courses — Self-paced learners meet social software: An exploration of learners’ attitudes, expectations, and experience . The whole piece is well worth reading, but I was specifically interested in their discussion of a Connectivist pedagogy.
Connectivist learning happens through the building of networks of information, contacts, and resources that are applied to real problems … Rather than formal and structured classes, connectivist learning is bursty (occurs in short, uneven spurts), driven by need and interest and is carried on beyond episodic classes, lectures and course
The part of this definition that interests me the most is bursty because of the way it envisions interaction and knowledge building outside the traditional boundaries of classes and lectures. When I think about tools like Facebook, Twitter, and the like, part of their appeal seems to be this episodic nature that perhaps presents interaction requirements as less burdensome and time-consuming, and therefore more likely to be engaged. From the research angle, the challenge is how to capture and analyze these episodic learning bursts. What about the interaction that students take outside the confines of the LMS? I can easily remember conversations I’ve had with students over the years who divulged how they created work spaces outside of the formal learning space (e.g., IM, Google Apps). A big part of this had to do with ease-of-use; these external tools were easier to use than those bundled with the LMS. Nevertheless, this still seems something worth following.
Good sessions today at PSU’s Teaching and Learning with Technology conference.
It opened with a keynote by The headliner was Michael Wesch. He, of course, gave us lots to think about, but one detail I’ve been mulling over for the moment is the connection between his early anthropological research in Papua New Guinea and his recent work on the impact of social media in education (Digital Ethnography). More to the point, he explained how when he first traveled to New Guinea he didn’t know the language, was unknown to those who lived there, and generally speaking, had no connection to speak of; and so, he was confronted with the challenge of creating a new identity. He then went on to explain that in a similar way, we are challenged to forge identities in this (comparatively) new and rapidly expanding social media landscape. How will these identities be developed by students in online learning spaces? How will these identities be reflected in personal avatars? Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab is doing some interesting work in this area.
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Michael Wesch, Penn State University, Stanford University
There’s been an expanding circle of discussion over the last few years about education delivered in the spirit of an open source model. And beyond the talk, there have been various implementations of it (MIT, Utah State, Tufts).
Perhaps an interesting variation on this trend is a company like Google who is not in the education business (in the traditional sense anyway), but has their Google Code University in which they make programming classes available via a Creative Commons license. So let’s say you have an interest in learning a programming language but aren’t sure you want to register for a full-fledged, traditional course. And let’s also say, you’re interested in learning Python because you’ve read that it’s one of the better languages for newbies to start with (e.g., 1, 2). Well, Google Code University would be a good option.
They organize the material into three categories: explanatory text, video, and applied exercises. The course designers have done a nice job of analyzing their audience as it doesn’t inundate the newbie with every little nuance related to Python, but enough to get the ‘programming hands’ a little dirty. Another interesting detail has to do with the video; it includes captioning, which not only accommodates hearing-impaired learners, but makes it easy for any one who may have missed a certain technical term, or its pronunciation to go back and see exactly what it was.
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Creative Commons, Google_Code_University
Was skimming one of the recent editions of the The Scout Report and saw this little Scholarpress gem for using your WordPress blog as a course management tool. Of course this has been happening for a while already, but one kind of feature that’s kind of nifty about this plugin is the assignments feature where you can link multiple assignments to one due date.
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Scholarpress, Scout Report, WordPress
Interesting evolution of instructional technology going on over at Bowling Green State University where one of the instructors introduces the course syllabus by way of a video embedded in a blog post. Behind the scenes, it looks like they’ve made this very easy by combining WordPress as the authoring platform and Screenr as the video (screencast) tool. Especially for those teaching online, this offers yet another way to enrich the level of social presence. Of course, the possibilities are more than one-way, since it would be very easy for students to produce creative, engaging posts as part of any assignment.