[iDC] Learning and sociality - re: Bill Gates's latest

Fri Aug 20 19:50:51 UTC 2010

Hi,
This is very interesting and of contrast to my personal experience. Not as a
student, but as an instructor.

I taught an online graduate class (strictly online, not blended/etc) for
over 5 years, and as far as I have observed, students not only interacted in
"class", but also took it beyond and interacted outside of class.

None of this, however, happened coincidentally. I specifically designed
every "classroom" experience to make sure they socially were engaged as they
discussed or worked on whatever material we dealt with. In addition, to also
make sure they interacted outside of the course about the material, in their
own terms, I designed projects they would work on. The tasks were designed
specifically to make them interact with each other and there was really no
other way to work on what they worked on in an effective manner.

In addition, I was there to very actively facilitate these interactions, you
know, not just gave them a project to work on. When I did not do a good job
of facilitation, the whole class got adversely affected (there were a couple
times I was not perfect, yes) even if everything else was the same.

I am not trying to blame anyone with bad teaching if their online classes do
not work this way, but the key point is, unlike me, most instructors have a
significant on-site teaching experience and they tend to try to transfer a
lot of it to their online teaching... Like using videos. Video, for example,
is a form of lecture and lecturing is not the strength of online
interaction. Yes, it is a fantastic experience to listen to a fantastic
lecture, but internet is not the place for it (okay, it is, but what I mean
is, it cannot be the main learning element. You can have video, you can have
lecture, but you really need more to achieve social engagement, and to get
the best out of the online context. And it is not just one thing, it is a
complex set of elements that you need to design into your instruction. FYI -
my class had no lecture element) and I strongly believe that we should use
media for what they are good for. And for online learning, we need to focus
on what the Internet helps us achieve best (best of a few): interact. And
this is where constructivism also comes in, in its very true sense. Even
just the very basics: teacher is not the authority, students construct their
own meaning, etc.

(There is a lot of literature on all of this - sorry I have not used any
references as I am pretty busy at the moment but I can respond to specific
questions, if any).

senom yalcin

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 6:12 PM, Lucia Sommer <sommerlucia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Vanalyne, for bringing up this important aspect of learning. Indeed,
> what's often forgotten around these discussions is that learning is social.
> When I think about what I learned during college that was ultimately most
> important to my life, it seems to me that most of it would have been
> impossible without both the open-ended social interaction that occurred in
> the classroom and the informal conviviality that occurred outside of the
> classroom. I am skeptical that this can be replicated in solely virtual
> environments.
>
> Lucia
>
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 10:30 AM, VANALYNE GREEN <v.green at leeds.ac.uk>wrote:
>
>> Hi, from someone who hasn’t contributed in a while.  Perhaps this voice
>> will seem a bit out-of-place, so I take that risk.  I’ve followed snippets
>> of the thread about education and I feel as if I’m living it out in the UK
>> higher education system.
>>
>> What often seems missing to me from the discussions is the idea of a
>> ‘scene.’  I’m not discussing parties, though that may be included, in a
>> college education.  What I really mean is an environment that is less about
>> what happens in a course and more about what happens outside the course but
>> because of good leadership or teaching.  I felt fortunate to have that at
>> Cal Arts.  One of my teachers (Sheila Levrant de Bretteville), gave us
>> problem sets where we had to create simultaneous social situations in and
>> around her class.  This made the teaching less centered on the teacher and a
>> thousand times more dynamic.  What I wonder is:  how to create ‘scenes’ via
>> courses that are more dependent on web-based learning?
>>
>> I use Project Implicit as a starting point for talking about unconscious
>> bias but there has to be a lot of work done in advance of students taking
>> the test to make the classroom environment safe enough to talk about their
>> ‘scores.’   I almost always encourage or have as a problem set the creation
>> of a blog.  Sometimes this works better than others.  Sometimes,
>> particularly shy students are liberated into speaking and being leaders in
>> the class via the web.  We use Facebook to organize events and create
>> profiles for work done in the course.
>>
>> The blog activities often do have the effect of creating a scene outside
>> the classroom, but this notion is far far away from what I think of when I
>> think of distanced learning and is highly contingent upon time in the
>> classroom.
>>
>> Gates’s latest, by way of puzzling out my question.
>>
>> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/
>>
>> Oh, and I use your chapter on collaboration, Trebor.
>>
>> Vanalyne
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Lucia Sommer
> 60 College Street
> Buffalo, NY 14201
> (716) 359-3061
>
>
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