Category Archives: Modelling behaviour

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Types of learning

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I keep losing this, and I keep needing it. Forms of learning in a psychologists’ community of practice:

    1. They learn about psychologists’ resources and how to access these 

    2. They learn the skills which are required of a psychologist 

    3. They learn how to behave as a psychologist 

    4. They learn how to think like a psychologist. 

    5. They learn the values of a psychologist. 

    6. They learn about the problems faced by psychologists
    7. 7. They learn the language of the psychologist.

Intuitive

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My reading of the DZX222 Help Conferences suggests a problem built into the online course idea. These days, we expect sotware and gadgets to be intuitive. If they’re not we get frustrated, angry and, more than likely, give up.

Now, DZX222 has a detailed set of printed materials, as you would expect from an OU course. Do students read them? No. Then they go to the Help conference, or somewhere else in FirstClass and start asking questions that are clearly answered in their course materials. Not only that, they don’t read other postings in the Help conference, or the FAQs posted at the top of that confeence, so they ask the same things again and again.

I think this links to the HeatMaps that I blogged a month or so ago. That showed that people who went to the library website tended to go automatically to the Help button, even when the link to what they required was on the Home screen.

I suppose this could be a digital natives v digital immigrants thing, but I don’t think so (not only because I don’t like the whole natives/immigrants analogy). I think people like to have technology / software explained to them by someone who knows, as they work through it. That’s what these students are trying to access. That’s why the Help conference is so useful.

And FirstClass isn’t intuitive. It’s got a bizarre threading system that I still haven’t managed to figure out. You can’t choose to file messages in a way that makes sense to you. You have to trawl through a lot of irrelevant stuff. And because the OU is in the process of migrating to Moodle, they won’t fix it.

Design principles (18.11.05)

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Back in 1994, Mike Godwin drew up these principles for making virtual communities work:
* use software that promotes good discussion
* Don’t impose a length limitation on postings
* Front-load your system with talkative, diverse people
* Let the users resolve their own disputes
* Provide institutional memory
* Promote continuity
* Be host to a particular interest group
* Provide places for children
* Confront the users with a crisis.
It would be interesting to see whehter anyone took these principles and ran with them. Do users resolve their own disputes, or do they leave? What are the benefits of including children in a community? What diffeence does it make to a community when you impose a word limit on postings?

In general, I think this old (9!) stuff tends to be irrelevant. So much has changed. Users, software, designers are all more sophisticated. Do Godwin’s principles have more than historical interest?

Gill commented:
All very good guidelines. However, in view of the results of your U800 survey (in which many of your respondents felt intimidated by the online conferences and thought that they were a vehicle for the more confident students to brag about their TMA scores amongst other things – hope I’ve paraphrased correctly) I now begin to wonder about the frontloading with talkative diverse people aspect.

It seems like a double-edged sword. If you do not have talkative diverse people, then the conference will die through lack of use. If you have a core of talkative diverse people, there are bound to be some who feel intimidated.

My experience (as one of the talkative diverse people that got front-loaded onto H806) was that the collaborative activities where we were split into quite small groups, helped the less confident to grow in confidence. Many of the non VLE based courses, i.e. those where collaboration online is not an assessed part of the course, may suffer because the quieter members have no impetus to get over their fear and gain confidence.

From the responses to your survey that you described to me, many people felt excluded from the online interactions and therefore felt no desire to join in.

I guess what I’m saying is that you need some activities that oblige all students to join in at the start. Just making the online conferences available with a group of chatty members in the hope that all will make use of it may not work too well.
Comment from euphloozie – 26/11/05 12:22

Role models (17.11.05)

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Burnett says: ‘ part of the “different flavour” of a given community can be seen in the particular norms and pattern of acceptable behaviours within the community. That is, each community emphasises its own particular patterns of interaction, and sets its own norms and expectations.’

That’s fairly obvious, I guess, but it fits in with the idea of tutors and experienced students modelling behaviour at the start so that the community gets off to a good start.

Of course, that assumes that the tutor and the experienced students have had good experiences before. Are there any models of successful virtual communities that are archived for people to look at?

What sort of training do you have to go on to become a moderator for a course?

Gill commented:
I’d recommend Gilly Salmon’s book entitled E-moderating. There’s a copy on my bookshelf if you fancy borring it 🙂

Gill
Comment from euphloozie – 18/11/05 09:29