Notes from TERG group meeting
On Thursday Oct 15th we had a TERG group meeting, where we:
shared our recent work, current activities and future plans
discussed an article about Connectivism (Siemens, 2005)
gave feedback to Karen on a draft book chapter.
These three types of activity will form a pattern for future group meetings, so that we keep up with what everyone is doing, discuss research literature, and provide constructive feedback on work-in-progress.
Members at the meeting were AndrewS, AndyL, Giselle, Karen, Mirabelle, Steve (via speakerphone) and Wendy.
Below are some brief notes on the meeting discussions.
Sharing what we are doing
Steve is working with colleagues on a proposed symposium for the Networked Learning conference. He will soon be starting an externally-funded research project related to the TUC.
Giselle has completed her project to develop an Open Educational Resource (OER) on ethics, and is now exploring possibilities for re-use of these. She has recently had a paper accepted by the International Journal of Learning that focuses on two case-studies carried out as part of her COLMSCT project.
Andrew is working closely with Cisco as part of their education programme. He has a paper accepted for their conference, reporting on students’ collaborative work with a remote network modelling tool.
Mirabelle is working with colleagues in the Department of Languages to continue her work on feedback to students. Other work includes contributing to a symposium on assessment, and a book chapter.
Wendy has been working on a Faculty project to review assessment practices. She has also been working on a conference paper for EARLI and a book chapter, as well as reviewing research bids for the ICS group of the HEA.
Andy continues to be heavily involved in research on Open Educational resources. In particular, he is working on the HEFCE-funded SCORE project.
Karen is occupied writing her book about online learning communities, and continuing her COLMSCT fellowship. Together with TERG colleagues, she has been researching students’ use of wikis and (more recently) Elluminate.
(Wendy, Giselle, Jon and Karen’s Web 2.0 conference workshop has been described in an earlier TERG blog post)
Discussing Connectivism
We had a lively discussion of the paper on Connectivism by George Siemens. This paper includes ideas related to chaos theory, social network analysis, distributed cognition, knowledge management, artificial intelligence etc. Group members were not convinced by the paper’s claim that Connectivism was a new learning theory. We felt that there was some confusion between learning as a process and learning as a product.
This discussion moved us on to the idea of digital scholarship, particularly ’publish-then-filter’ approaches to sharing ideas within the educational community.
Feedback on draft chapter
Finally, group members gave some feedback on Karen’s draft chapter on learning theories. Points made include:
What is the audience and purpose for the book?
Need to make links between theory and practice, and to give practice prominence.
Needs taking more slowly (especially cognitive versus social constructivism).
Case study example is helpful for understanding and enlivening the theory.