Director of Training & Knowledge Management + Educational Researcher + Professor + Poet + Wikipedian = Liminality + Actor-Network Theory + Open Education
If you are planning to submit a paper for the 2010 Networked Learning Conference, you better hurray–the date for submissions is only a week away. Key dates and submission specs are listed here.
I am busily revising a paper that I am co-authoring, and hope to submit it by Thursday. Planning for the best!
I asked my students in my a PPOCCID class to do some searching for online references / discussions about the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) instructional design model. I find this model very useful in many applications (especially in project management of learning initiatives), though have recently been more intrigued with the A as in Addie.
What does it mean to Analyze the needs of the audience? Well, I have to make sure this is a need the training or learning or education or development can address. Who needs to learn what? Why do they need to learn this? What are the obstacles? Who are the proponents of this (often these are not the learners)? What do they want (and why)? Are the goals the learners have (if they even have any, and if they can be articulated) and the goals of the proponents of the learning the same (or at least close enough that they are not opposed)?
What roles does this power play, especially within organizational dynamics? Can what works for one be transferable to others? Have you ever found it is easier to analyze the needs of others rather than ourselves? Always more questions than answers; while this can be frustrating at times, I find this endless interest quite enlivening and engaging!
I suppose I am considering these issues right now as I am beginning a Module 3 in my doctoral program at Lancaster University. Nice how various parts of my professional, academic, and personal elements of my life tend to fit together from time to time!
One of the weekly assignments I have for the online class I am teaching, Principles and Practices of Online Course Creation and Instructional Design (#PPOCCID), is for my students to have a weekly blog post about something to do with the content of our class. I make the assignment rather broad, as I know that learning can take place at odd times and in unlikely ways, so I want my learners to feel flexibility in what they write about and explore.
With this in mind, I wanted to follow my own assignment and discuss something I found interesting in one of the readings from this past week’s class (where I ran out of time and did not discuss), Tools for Online Engagement and Communication by Richard S. Lavin, Paul A. Beaufait, and Joseph Tomei. In this chapter, the authors do an excellent overview of a number of current web-based technologies that are useful to help people develop their online identities, communicate their stories with peers, and begin to engage in online community.
With the focus on blogs, wikis, and technologies to assist with digital storytelling, I am reminded of how I started blogging several years ago to explore my own thinking, and still use it to help me process my work, usually with the benefit of getting additional feedback that in turns helps me move my thinking forward.
With this in mind, I like how the authors of this chapter (who do one of the better introductions to blogs and wikis) begin it:
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are
few.” (Suzuki, 2006, p. 21)
In Zen Buddhism, there is a notion of beginner’s mind (shoshin in Japanese), in which a person seeking enlightenment is asked to look at things as they are, without preconceived notions. A goal of looking at things from learners’ perspectives is to see things the way new students do, and to anticipate problems and bottlenecks that they might face, a task that takes on added significance in light of the relative newness of online education. Online education acts as a universal solvent, dissolving many of the notions and axioms that we have taken for granted.
I have thought a lot about blogging, and have engaged in it for so long that my perceptions about it may be different from how those new to the concept of blogging may perceive it. I have seen learners grow in their sophistication, professionalism, academic prowess, and even reflective practice, and am so look forward to seeing how my current learners experience this.
I created a simple blog rubric for my online class, and am interested in some feedback on it.
The assignment, as stated in my syllabus:
Reflective Practice is a critical aspect of teaching and learning, and a fundamental element of teaching online involves acquiring a comfort with technology to communicate and collaborate.
Online learning is a more networked experience than traditional face-to-face (F2F) learning. Thus, students are required to use a blog for this course. Students may use their own blog (if they have one) or create a new one (WordPress.com, Blogger, Epsilen, or elsewhere). Blog posts should be done at least once a week discussing some learning or a reaction to anything in the course.
Making at least two comments every week on other course attendee blogs is required.
As I am intending the student (all of whom are adults) blogs to consider any issue in class and then relate it to their practice, this is the rubric I created:
For your own weekly blog post(s), be sure to:
- Post your blog entry before the due date ~ 0.5
- Post a link to your Blog posting in the Forum ~ 0.5
- Discuss and develop some aspect of online learning / education ~ 1.0
- Demonstrate that you are able to apply what you are learning to your professional practice ~ 1.0
Total = 3 points
I will ask them how this feels and if it works after we do our first assignment of this, so until then, I am open to other considerations for verbiage or total point (3 points / week) re-distribution. Thoughts?
This workshop is compised of a fascinating group of people, many of whom I hope to learn more about over the remaining 6 weeks, and I am very glad we will narrow things down a bit to begin working on whatever tasks we devise. With so many interesting backgrounds and such passion among the participants, I am now more intrigued about where we are going than when I started.
I wonder how many of them will ultimately plan to attend the Networked Learning Conference 2010, as a number of them already seem to be closer to Europe and Denmark than I am?