Category: Community of Practice (CoP)

Learning Objective for FOC08, or Is It?

I have been speaking with a few of my colleagues, namely Sylvia Currie and Bronwyn Stuckey, as well as reading some of the blogs of our online class members, including Leigh Blackall (the class facilitator), Joao Alves, and Mike Bogle (whose posting inspired me to write this one), and decided I want to be a little more specific.

What learning objective shall I adopt for this course?

I spoke about this a bit with a new colleague in the class, Lynne Gilliland Garber (congrats on your first blog!), and have been thinking about refining what I initially intended for me to try to accomplish in this class. I can name this or that, such as learn more or experience something or meet people or the like, yet I am not sure that I will be in the same place at the end of December when the class ends. My interests and needs and experiences and expectations all will have changed. Learning itself often means more than developing knowledge or gathering a skill. Can the learning objective I may set today be valuable for me in five months? Will I still care about what I want today when I am in a different place then? Am I just going to be satisfied with wanting something I can envision now, without allowing for or regarding that which I do not even know exists tomorrow?

As an instructional designer, I face and create objectives every day. How else can we measure how successful a class or learning experience is? How else will we be able to establish the direction for our class, or have a glimpse of what we want to get out of the experience?

Let me pose it in a different way–how can we establish an objective and then hold ourselves to it for an experience that we have not had yet? If my objective is to learn to blog, but I walk away from the class with closer friends and colleagues, or a more expanded worldview of how we can foster global communities of practice using technologies and methods I do not yet even know exist, who cares if I learned to blog? Strict learning objectives would have me count the course a failure, as I would not have gotten what I came to get. Given my worldview from transformative learning, with a little spice of Foucault, Denzin, Brookfield, and Lyotard thrown in for good measure, I believe we need to set objectives and goals, but they can change and develop just as we do.

Back to this online course. For my objectives in this course, I want to:

  • apply methods of facilitating online communities to the online courses I am developing at NYU
  • develop my perspective of global online community of practice-based education

Let’s see how these may develop over the class itself.

Facilitating Online Communities (FOC08) Class Notes HERE

As I mentioned earlier this week, I just registered for another online class, Facilitating Online Communities.

I really like how Leigh Blackall, the facilitator for the class, has listed the assignments and is being more than patient with the flurry of email that is moving around from the course Google Group.

The assignments for the first week are:

  1. Set up a blog to record the course notes. Done–I already have my own blog and will use it for this course as well as for my other work.
  2. Listen to the recording for the first week. Not done yet; I have trouble focusing on something like this, and it may be one of the reasons I do not listen to podcasts too often as well. I listen to the radio all the time, but it usually becomes background noise. Thus, my challenge–how to make background noise into something I have to consciously focus on. Will have to try to do this.
  3. Post here what I hope to get from this course. OK; here goes. I hope to learn more about online communities and how best to facilitate them. I have recently started to get active in CPsquare as I find a lot of value in collaborating with people who have different perspectives (due to the international audience and variety of experiences and education) from me in the areas of technology and adult learning. I am hoping that this class, which stretches for several months well into the Fall (in the US, at least) will give me ideas and encourage me to try new things with my online and F2F classes I teach. I am wondering how to apply the research, work, and experience from the communities of practice to higher education classes. I try to teach in a democratic manner, and am wondering how students may be encouraged to learn differently from this perspective. I hope Leigh’s class will help me think this through.
  4. Introduce myself on the course discussion page. Done. Additionally, I just added my blog to my post there.
  5. Set up an RSS blog reader, and subscribe to the blog posts of those in the class. Well, I use FeedDemon, which is an offline reader that synchs online (so I can access the same feeds home and at work).  I like having these things offline, but there has been so much talk about Google Reader, that perhaps I should check that one out as well. My question here is how to get all the RSS feeds for the class? Some people have tried to do this with various tools, but all the lists appear inconsistent. Will have to consider this on my own I suppose.

Let me speak for a moment on my first impressions. Leigh has done a tremendous amount of preparation for this class. Kudos to him! It does seem, however, that some of the students have started a flurry of discussion about tools and technology and the like–so much that I am already having trouble keeping up. Now, I am an instructional designer, university adjunct faculty member who teaches in and with technology, and do consider myself somewhat conversant in using technology; yet I am still struggling to keep up with all the emails that are discussing tools and such. I do, however, think it is very valuable to have this conversation, and am always happy to have (and sometimes be one of the) students who have passion and try to share it with others for the betterment of the entire experience. We need passionate people who want to share! My concern is for those who are not as fluent in the tools already and who may be a bit overwhelmed with hearing and seeing too much at once (namely, by day 3!). Interesting experience as I do not normally feel like one of them.

Nevertheless, we are off to a wonderful start, and I only hope that this passion remains and develops! 

The New CPsquare Website

CP2logo Wonderful news that the updated CPsquare website is up and running, now on a new and improved WordPress platform. There are even working RSS feeds there, so if you have not been to their website recently (or better stated, our website (as I am a member!)), go and take a look. Running on a blogging foundation, there should now me more regular posts and adjustments on the front page.

Let’s see how the community of practice uses its new community website!

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Facilitating Online Communities Class

I just learned from my colleague Sylvia Currie at SCoPE that there is a new, online class that begins today–Facilitating Online Communities. Facilitated by Leigh Blackall at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, this seems like another of the intersting summer learning experiences to be aimed at a global audience of community facilitators and educators.

I just signed up for it, and am looking forward to several weeks of learning and meeting new colleagues. I am thinking more and more about a class as a virtual community of practice, and am hoping to learn some ways to integrate this into my online teaching, especially my upcoming Principles and Practices of Online Course Creation and Instructional Design course and the online graduate courses I will teach thereafter.

Empowering Online Learning ~ Online Book Discussion

r2d2It is turning into a busy summer of online educational technology and online community book discussions. The copy of Curtis Bonk and Ke Zhang’s new text, Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing, just arrived. Curt blogged about his book, and I am looking forward to beginning the discussion at SCoPE.

As Curt explains in the text, R2D2 in his work stands for Read, Reflect, Display, and Do. I have heard some colleagues mention concepts such as this, and my interest as an instructor and instructional designer is peaked. It seems the book is oriented toward higher and adult education, so this should fit. I am looking forward to learning a lot here!

Did I mention that this book discussion is free to join? SCoPE is a wonderful community that Sylvia Currie coordinates, and is well worth getting to know if you have any involvement at all in educational community and practice as supported through technology.