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

Tue Aug 31 12:43:21 UTC 2010

Thanks, Lucia and Senom,

I'm trying to parse what you're saying, Senom, in how you, in a way,
'engineer' a social scene via on-line teaching.  I don't negate the
possibility, but I do have questions.  What strategies did you use for
creating a 'class outside the class,' i.e.  I'm intrigued with the idea of
having no lectures.

What strikes me as necessary in a scene are the elements of play and
randomness.  I know how to create this in a classroom; I've seen good
results sometimes from on-line situations, such as blogs, as I mentioned
earlier.  But if a course is completely on-line, how do you make that
'complex set of elements' bounce around?  Can you give some more examples of
what has worked -- and not?

Another thought that's been going around in my mind:   In an interesting
moment during the feminism's Second Wave, a dear colleague offered a Marxist
interpretation of feminism as being the ideological helpmate of capitalism's
need to get women into the workforce.  Feminism legitimated something that
was on its way.  I am a feminist and a Marxist slant on things doesn't
alienate me from feminism, but my friend Carol's ideas have always stayed
with me.  Apropos, I wonder if we might consider that the theorizing we do
about on-line learning, however vital, elegant, subversive, intelligent and
necessary, serves global capitalism quite well?

Best,

Vanalyne

On 20 August 2010 20:50, Senom Yalcin <sonicim at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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