Category Archives: Communities

CAL Monday noon

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OK – biting the bullet. I CAN read through my conference notes. I DO want to blog about this – especially the first presentation, which was so relevant to my work. 

Taking a stance: promoting deliberate action through online postgraduate professional development Peter Kelly, K Gale, S Wheeler and V Tucker, University of Plymouth
See also: Kelly, Peter (2006) What is teacher learning? A socio-cultural perspective. Oxford Review of Education 32 (4)


Peter distributed a draft copy of the related research paper. This has an excellent bibliography, which is really relevant to me. All the right keywords: asynchronous written discourse, identity exploration, online community of practice… 

He has carried out six case studies in an online community of prractice related to an education MA. The students were able to immerse themselves in problems brought to the comunity by their tutor (I’m not sure I’d relish the opportunity to immerse myself in problems 🙂  ) Peter explores the success of the community in supporting identity exploration and transformation. participants describe tensions between their professional identities and the identities ascribed to them by their professional circumstances.

There is an interesting section on the key role writing plays in promoting and developing lifelong professional learning, which we should reference in our blogging article.

The paper focuses on three areas:

1 the influence of their relationship to the technology on students’ participation in the online  community
2 identity exploration and change
3 The quality of the asynchronous written dialogue.

Procrastination

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I’ve been off for a week with flu, and I’m really up against the deadlines. So, what do I spend an hour or so doing? Shifting furniture around the office with Gill and Anesa. We’ve now got a very airy office with a large ‘junk’ corner. And my conference paper is still nowhere.

Is email a dying art?

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John Lanchester, Guardian Weekend, 4 Nov 2006 http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1940641,00.html

‘Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, “email’s main function is an instrument of torture”. In civilian life, I increasingly ntice that people don’t actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past.’

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.

DZX222 Tutor Day

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Interviewing Gill via email reminded me, indirectly, that I ought to blog about the DZX222 tutor day at the beginning of the month.

Some of the points raised included: the virtual sumer school is not a break from everyday life for students like a residential school. Students may feel isolated and vulnerable to both doubt and distraction.

A week online equates to a day at residential school. Tutors need to get students to summarise their progress regularly. They shuld encourage discussion of ideas and suggestions. They should avoid providing instant solutions.

Tutors also need to remember several things. One student can tend to take over a  group – there is a need to be on the alert for this. It’s easy to think you are replying to one student but others will read replies and may be daunted by a complex answer – even if that answer is appropriate for the student you are addressing. On the other hand, students may not read replies to other students, so important information needs to be put in bold with a changed header.

There are three major causes of argument amongst students: (1) students have the perception that they are carrying others (2) the chosen project is too complicated (3) an unofficial grup leader emerges.

There is also a danger of bullying. If postings make students feel daunted or overwhelmed that is a form of bullying. There is a need to investigate student silences. Are the students unhappy? Do they understand what is happening?

Group size

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Martin LeVoi referred to ‘critical mass’ – the size that an online group needs to be in order to be effective. Thought I’d go and check this out. ‘Critical mass’ doesn’t appear to be a technical term in regular use in the literature, but there is some discussion of group size.

Glass and Smith looked at 80 studies of F2F classes which concluded that smaller clases were better with respect to student achievement, classrom processes and teacher and student attitudes. Hayes suggested that distance learners need small groups so they can share and critique project work. He felt that a group of five would allow students to enjoy a rich exchange and feel part of a learning comunity without wasting time sifting through umpteen postings.

A virtual community must have enough participants to allow a significant level of interaction. Gilly Salmon suggests that an ideal size is up to nine.

Four is often considered the ideal in F2F situations because the group is large enough to hold diverse opinions, to draw on different experiences and to approach the subject in different ways. It is not so big that someone can hide and not pull their weight.

Rice suggests a critical mass of 8-10 – generating sufficient volume of interactions without being overwhelming.

Second Life

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overheard.jpg

 At the DZX222 weekend, Martin LeVoi gave a very interesting talk on how the virtual res school had originated (1994: 12 students, 14 staff, all the students had to have computers and mobile phones shipped to them). Now that it’s been running annually since 2002 and is attracting 700 students in one year, Martin is still thinking of ways to be at the cutting edge. One is obviously Moodle – everything at the OU is going to have to adjust to the VLE in the next few years. 

Martin also raised the issue of Second Life http://secondlife.com/ which is a virtual world where you go and live a second life in avatar form. I’m torn between thinking this is pointless and thinking it might be good fun. It’s obviously very lucrative – the onscreen currency can be converted into hard cash and there are people who make their living in this virtual environment. I read in the New Scientist about one who earns his living as a hitman. Anyway, that’s off the point. Universities are starting to appear there. The OU could construct a virtual campus and students could meet and discuss in avatar form. At the moment it’s rather clunky, partly because there’s no lip-synching on the avatars, but this could be where the Jennie Lee building goes next time it is demolished and reconstructed.

Oh, and they like you to note that their pics are copyright:

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Palindrome Intermedia performance group

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You can see them in action at http://www.palindrome.de/

We had two performances by this group, who use motion tracking software and a host of other gadgetry to foreground the ways in which human conversation involves a host of other things beside words. Eye motions, body position, movement, they’re all involved.

So sound and dance and movement and visuals are all brought together. And it looks good. On paper.

Can’t say I took much from it, except a reinforced consciousness of how many real world cues are lost when you move online. On the other hand, they’re probably replaced by a host of other cues. There’s a paper in there somewhere about the myriad social cues available in an online conference.

I’m going to create a new blog category – papers that could be written and I’ll never get round to…

Research questions

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* Which are the main subject positions to be found within a learning community which comes together in an aynchronous online environment?

* How are these subject positions introduced or created?

* Which of these subject positions work to support learning, and which discourage learning?

* How can the asynchronous environment be designed in order that participants will position themselves, and others, in ways which support learning?  

How would I answer these questions? Well, first of all I’ve got to find an online community which comes together in an asynchronous environment. It’s probably best if they only come together online, because then I have access to all the whole-community activity. The other activity of the comunity eg texts, emails, IMs, meetings, phone conversations I could catch either through interviews or through participant observation.

I’d probably want more than one community so I could generalise. On the other hand, this is potentially a vast set of data, so I don’t want to go wild and have lots of communities. What about one community on which I focus, and another three where I observe but don’t collect so much data? 

So, four OU courses which come together via First Class. They’d better be undergraduate, because postgraduate isn’t so generalisable. They’d better be in different disciplines, because that makes it more generalisable. If I want to be a participant observer it might be best to have a course that I’ll find relatively easy, so I don’t have to waste huge amounts of time doing the work. Or, another possibility, if I were tutoring on the course I’d have access to different sorts of data.

And position/identity has a very strong link with gender so I’d like to look at a mostly boy course and a mostly girl course, and perhaps at a level one / openings course where people aren’t used to being students, and a level three course where they’re used to learning.

And it;s probably better if they’re not being too reflexive, so not one of the courses on identity.

Creating relationships (7.2.06)

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Ingvill says that ‘in studying an educational activity such as project work, it is essential to take into acoount that participants have existing and established relationships.’ That’s obviously true of her work in the classroom, but I wonder to what extent it would relate to an asynchronous conference? There may be pre-existing relationships from other courses. I suppose there are more likely to be generic relationships – people expect their relationship with the supervisor to be like past relationships, they expect students to be pretty much like other students they have encountered online.