I'm Feeling Creative Again

I took this photograph with my Blackberry yesterday at the Lowell Folk Festival. We were heading back to the car after an afternoon of music, crafts, seeing friends, and people watching when this store window caught my eye. The maniquins are inside the window. The African masks are on a table in front of the window, outside the store. I love the juxtaposition of the mask-like faces with the face-like masks.

I love taking pictures and putting words to them. I feels sizzlingly creative. The juices flow. I had no idea of what I was going to write when I decided to post this picture. All I wanted to do was to share the picture with you. And no, the stolid expressions on the masks and manequins do NOT reflect my current mood. Like I said, I'm feeling creative again. No lonely, expressionless face any more.

Online Learning Communities: For Visual Learners

Two pictures: The first one is my husband, Jeff, and me last January in Boulder. You can see our smiles, the twinkle in our eyes. Something of our personality shows through.

The second one is my husband in the Minneapolis airport on the way home from Boulder. This image is "flat," even though I like its stark beauty [I enhanced it with Photoshop, taking out extraneous details and darkening the sillouette]. You can't see the twinkle in Jeff's eyes or anything about his personality, age, style. This is how I feel about the people in the online learning community. We are engaged with other in an intellectual, cerebral, and very limited way. We are sillouettes to each other, flat.

Online Learning Communities: A Down Hill Slope

At first I was very gung ho about the idea of collaborative learning communities. This is my fourth online course, and I’ve enjoyed them so far, although the two I've enjoyed the most were the one's in which I met colleagues [who I am still friends with] in person to work on projects. I’ve also been working for UMASS for about a year doing online Wimba support. I’ve loved that too. I’ve thought, “how cool is this getting online in real time with people all over the planet.”

Recently, though, I feel different. I’m getting lonely. Working on a virtual team with people I’ve never met is getting old. I would like to know who my colleagues are. They feel very one dimensional. I have a vague idea of what they look like, what their hobbies are, where they live, what their voices sound like, whether they are reliable workers or not, but that’s about it. I long to invite them to my back yard to shoot the breeze and eat watermelon.

I’m feeling the same about this course—somewhat disconnected, lonely, wondering who all of the people behind the posts are, and at the same time, wondering if I even care. Yes, other people’s feedback has influenced, even changed, my opinions on some of the course content, which is good. But the loneliness is getting to me, and I’m loosing motivation. I find myself distracted by other things I want to learn [this week it’s Web 2.0] and less able to focus on this class.

Brenda is doing all of the “right” things, structuring in collaborative activities, giving us lots of feedback, keeping the interaction between us going, but for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, its not working well enough to keep me as motivated as I was at the beginning of the course.

I’m starting to think that I would do better with a cohort model where students in the program started at the same time and met in person [the Nantucket thing, but as a cohort all starting and going through the program together]. I would also like to try a hybrid course. I have a hunch I would feel more part of a learning community if the other members were more 3-D than I experience my colleagues in this course to be.

Interesting elearning Graphic

This is an interesting grid. The question mark in the middle invites us to add to this framework. What's missing from this list of subsets of elearning?

Source: http://mivanova.blogspot.com/2007/10/elearning-branches.html

Eureka! A Course is a Constructivist Classroom

According to the definition of "classroom" on dictionary.com [based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary], a classroom is either (1) a room, as in a school or college, in which classes are held, or (2) any place where one learns or gains experience.

This may sound silly, but I just realized that online courses are "classrooms." Since I work with Wimba, I had conceptualized a classroom as something that happens in real time. Wimba is officially called "Wimba Classroom," and people refer to it as a classroom. It used to be called "Wimba Live Classroom." I figured the course was the course, and Wimba was the classroom.

Last night I had a light bulb moment. I finally "got it" that the entire course is a "constructivist classroom" [I can't remember where I read that term, but I did not make it up.]. The Learning Management System doesn't just deliver content, it creates a space in which one learns, a classroom. Conceptualizing the course as a constructivist classroom makes all of the pieces fit together. The emphasis on communication, the group projects, the instructor presence, the works. It also jives with the adult learning theory we learned about in Canice's class--the anti-lecture instructional strategies of group work, dyads, having people work on projects they choose based on their interests, etc.

It’s nice to finally have all the material I’ve been gobbling up since last September make sense! Eureka!

Blackboard Does NOT Affect Learning

We have been looking at online learning in general and discussing whether the technology affects learning. I will look more specifically at whether Blackboard affects student learning or just transmits content. (Note: In my Wimba support work at UMASS Boston, I am able to view ALL online courses offered every semester. This means I have seen at least 300 courses, all delivered in Blackboard, since last September.)

The Assessment tool enables the following types of questions: calculation, combination, fill in the blank, jumbled sentence, matching, multiple choice, paragraph, short answer, true/false. This does not affect learning. The strategy of HOW to use assessments affects learning, not the tool itself.

The Assignment tool does not affect learning, it merely collects student work.

The Announcement, Mail, Calendar, the Roster, Who’s Online with instant messenger, and Chat tools enable a learning community. This does not enhance learning; it just makes communication possible. Of course, communication DOES affect learning (Constructivist theory). In this context, however, I view communication as a means of overcoming the time/place disconnect of virtual learning. Communication "normalizes" online learning, rather than enhances it. Lack of communication would have a greater affect on learning. It would detract from it.

Learning modules deliver content: Assessments, Assignments, Chat, Discussions, Media Collections, SCORM modules, web links, and content in files. This does not affect learning, just delivers the content.

The Discussion tool (threaded, blogs, journals) DOES affect learning, as it enables deep reflection (Cognitive theory)

The Goals tool, quite frankly, is useless. Goals (objectives) are better stated in the syllabus and at the beginning of each learning module.

Hence, as far as Blackboard goes, I agree with Clark (2001) quoted in Mohamed Ally, in Foundations of Educational Theory for Online Learning (http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/) that [at least for Blackboard] “technologies are merely vehicles that deliver instruction, but do not themselves influence student achievement.”

Maybe the real point is that Blackboard needs an overhaul. Maybe the developers of Blackboard should study learning theory and create a new learning enviornment (I don't know what that would look like). Maybe emerging technologies should some how be incorporated into this old-fashioned LMS.

Horse Travel, Anyone?

I took this image in the Minneapolis airport with a two-megapixel point & shoot (talk about old technology!). It's a series of colored lights hanging from the ceiling. The notable thing here is that it took turning the image on its head to make it worth looking at.

Comments on the web article, "Student Frustration with a Web-Based Distance Education Course (http://www.firstmonday.dk \/issues/issue4_12/hara/index.html#author)

I find it interesting that a research project about the isolation of online learners turned into a study about frustrations—a lack of prompt feedback, ambiguous instructions, and technical problems. I can totally relate to all three frustrations, as I have experienced them myself.

Yet, let’s remember that this article was written in the early 90s, before most of us were socialized to use email, web browsers, search engines, social bookmarking, and the other web and web 2.0 tools we take for granted. Also, the course in question was presented as a website, not via a learning management system, and the teacher had never taught online before.

We’re in a transition period, folks. Prensky (http://www.marcprensky.com/) talks about this when he conceptualizes people into two camps, digital natives and digital immigrants. It’s probably like the transition from horses to cars, or from working on the farm to working in a factory, or even adopting telephone technology. (Hello Central, connect me to Joe, please.)

Give it ??? years. By that time, instructors will know how to teach online (there will still be good and bad teachers), students will know how to learn online (it will work for some and not for others), and everyone will be as fluent with the technology as we are with driving cars. And when email fails, we can pick up the phone and call each other. Imagine that!