Return of the blog October 7th, 2008
This blog is fixed and I will begin using it to stay connected to students and the tight little blogospehre they have created. I have felt out of the loop in recent weeks. Partly because my teaching at Fraser International College has been sucking any pedagogical energy from me and partly because I have not been using web2.0 to stay connected — not using it to its full advantage. Guess what, sending out emails is so web 1.0 and it just does not work. I need constant feedback to keep up my energy for this course (by far my favorite) and I’m just not getting it. No fault of my students thats for sure.
And the grades. I still have not fixed the grades and I can’t figure out what is wrong, but I have students thinking they are getting Fs when I give them As. That can’t be helping. I will get that fixed.
So I have to work on a way to get feedback to students and encourage them to continue. Because I am really happy with the work they have been doing. It’s a small group of active students but they seem to be embacing (with some caution) the whole 2.0 mindset.
Getting started February 5th, 2008
This course began with a talk I gave at Emily Carr on teaching online: Weblogs, Wikis + Podcasting. John Maxwell, faculty member with SFU’s Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, talked about his use of wikis and his pedagogy of “radical trust.” He introduced us to his Thinkubator. It was an amazing and enlightening talk. I spoke mostly of practical matters around blogs and podcasting lectures: finding your podcasting voice, use of video, and some general issues around teaching media studies online. There were a number of pedagogical issues* I only touched on:
Three pedagogical principles for media studies
1. Empowerment
- Gained through a set of theoretical & critical tools
- Set in relation to the media and hegemonic ideology
- Critical analysis as a social/political practice
2. Experience
- Teaching media takes into account students’ social experience:
- With media
- With social institutions
- With values and assumptions
- Learning can be integrated with that experience to foster:
3. Relevance to Everyday Life
- Change students’ relationship to media and their meanings
- Change students’ relationship to social experience.
Elearning network model:
Critical theory maintains that meaning is social, shared, dynamic. It structures our perceptions & social relationships. How is this paradigm applied to learning & knowledge? To the traditional classroom? To the virtual classroom? A network model.
- Elearning environment as a network – unlike hierarchical, podium-centric classroom.
- Learning emerges from network formation
- Instructors and students are nodes on a network
- A network knows more than any one individual
- A network is dynamic
- Network allowed to self-organize, adapt to individuals, context, information & learning tasks.
- Less hierarchical
- A network can decentralize learning
- Students and instructor collaborate with peers with social networking
- Students actively participate in generating knowledge – learning how to learn and share knowledge.
- Students contribute to a knowledge base
- The web preserves and makes accessible that knowledge base for future learners
- Activity Oriented
- Analysis
- Find a present relevant examples to peers
- offer critique
- Discussion on forum or blog platform
- Sharing experience online
- Writing
- Student blogs
- Student podcasts
- Wiki contributions
- Image based documents, PPT, video
- Formal essays
- Analysis
Connections to external network: The virtual world is the real world
- Learning how to access relevant information is the most important skill in a world of exponentially expanding knowledge.
- Sharing knowledge in the public realm should be a goal
- addressing student discomfort with public performance
To be continued: Meeting the Challenge: Strategies of course development
* Some of the terms of reference and ideas are taken from George Siemens‘ excellent work on connectivism.