Progress in Online Learning

This week I had three readings about Activity Theory from Wolf-Michael Roth, Bonnie A. Nardi and Sasha Barab. The theory has its original roots in Karl Marx and as you can see from the Wikipedia article, many of it’s roots seem to be in Moscow.

The theory as applied by the mentioned authors allows for a framework of analyzing the nature of actions within a community of focus, such as an online learning community. Everyone seems to agree that there are three AT components: subjects, objects and tools. Sasha was able to use these interactions to tune an online collaboration website for teachers and Nardi adds the element of passion to ask the question of why.

I also have a few observations from the student side about online learning that I would like to mention:

Online learning takes more time that you think. To really participate in the asynchronous discussion, you have to read the incoming messages as they are happening and respond right then. For the last two weeks, I have waitied for a scheduled time, read all the posts and made a few replies. I can tell that I am missing something by using this approach.

Synchronous Chats benefit greatly from ground rules. This week’s chat was much easier to follow simply because we had a bit of structure (we knew what the main topic of the chat was going to be) and some conventions such as a trailing “…” meant that more text is coming from someone so wait before typing something new.

Emerging Media Seminar

 

This week I spent six hours with the producers and designers at WPT facilitating for a discussion about some of the trends in media. We walked through subjects such as:

Audio/Video Formats and DRM

Blogs

WIKIs

Social Networks

Tagging and Social Bookmarking

Video Games as New Media

Next time around I hope to spend more time on games and the upcoming trends like mashups, portable media devices, crowdsourcing, etc.

Here is the PDF of the presentation if you are interested.

Online Learning – A student perspective

It has been almost three years that I have been advocating the use of Moodle as an opensource course management system, though for only a week have I been on the other side of that recommendation.

My overall impressions have been good, especially in the ease of establishing an online profile. After logging in the first time, I was taken to the profile page and uploaded a photo I had lying around from the last conference I was speaking at, put in a bio and set up a blog in a few clicks. Beautiful.

The course I am in is being led by Sharon Derry, a member of the great league of learning scientists. (is that safe to say Sharon?) We are looking to study and hopefully create an online community and have spent our first week reading up on some of the foundational literature on group cognition, effectiveness and communication.

In Stahl, “Communicating with Technology” the topic of groupware came up in an academic setting, directly following a historical chart outlining the move from individual to social education theory. I took great interest in this article due to my history of working with the Microsoft Exchange groupware product and my daily dependence on things like oracle calendar here at the University. Unfortunately, I am still at a loss on how exactly to communicate the benefits of such a system so that it is adopted.

We also read an article, Kozlowski & Ilgen, “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups & Teams” that outlines some of the scholarship on team dynamics that lead to task fulfilling, viable workgroups and a paper by Akkerman et al., “Reconsidering Group Cognition” which illuminates the transition into a social-cultural perspective.

Moodle does a fantastic job for this format of class. The articles are easily found and the forums couldn’t be nicer. However, the synchronous chat that we used for our hour class time was not very effective. There was a lag time of at least 10 seconds for every statement I wrote (in iChat you actually see the others typing in real-time) and I didn’t see the ability to do any private chatting. In addition, there was no spell checking which of course revealed exactly how ignorant I really am.

Technology aside, I am curious to see how to properly facilitate for a group of this size (8 or so students) in a text chat. I personally found myself struggling to keep up with the often divergent conversation. It felt as though by the time I had something to say it was no longer relevant. I also noticed a tendency to create acronyms on the fly to reduce typing speed at the cost of confusion. With certainty I can say that a traditional discussion around a table is a much more natural form of discourse, though I hope that I will adapt to this mode of communication the way I have adapted to all the others.

Has anyone seen any best practices for facilitating for online chat?