The group task for us during Week 3 was to... "continue with the collaborative learning theme and reflect in a group about the performance of the group" (George Roberts).
We had to produce a summary of the discussions we had that were related to the task in Week 2 (see previous blog). Introspective stuff.
Week 3 was not easy for me, because I had some very heavy commitments elsewhere that took up lunchtimes and just about every evening; this, combined with the ongoing problems that are a repercussion of the flood at work two weeks ago, meant that I got way behind on this one, and only contributed right at the end of the week.
Fortunately other team members did a good job, under Jenny's stewardship. Overall I don't think that many of us matched the previous week in terms of input, but then again that would take some beating.
We started off by pairing up in order ask each other questions about how we felt the previous week went; some pairs produced considerable input.
Jenny then came up with a series of questions we should ask ourselves, and this progressed by a number of us each taking Jenny's initial list of questions, and typing in our own responses
She then summarised these responses in a table; on the horizontal axis:
"The questions we asked ourselves"
"A summary of our answers"
"Critical incidents that affected our group performance"
"Additional Comments"
Then on the vertical axis:
"What kick started us? How long did it take to get going?"
"How did we establish the roles within the group and how happy were we with our individual role and that of others?"
"Which roles did we feel were most significant for this task?"
"Which events/actions were critical to the completion of the task?"
"What were the strengths of the group?"
"What were the weaknesses of the group?"
"Would we have worked any differently f2f?"
"How would we evaluate our final submission?"
"If we were being assessed for the submission, how well do you think we would have done?"
"If we were being assessed by our peers for our contribution, how well do you think we would have done?"
"What could we have learned from Yellow and Blue groups (the other two groups from the cohort)?"
Each cell of this table comprised a summary of the answers we gave to the list of questions that were originally as circulated by Jenny.
Our final submission was OK - but Jenny really did most of the work here.
The plenary task asked of us was to each prepare an inventory of good practice in e-moderation.
What we've learned so far was reflected in these postings.
I believe that if you're a good f2f teacher then you'll probably make a good e-moderator, although I don't think it's necessarily the case the other way round, due to the additional demands and pressures that face a classroom teacher. However, it is my opinion that a good e-moderator will make a good f2f tutor.
I tried express this view by looking at what an authoritative text said about being a good teacher; or rather a special kind of teacher - the preacher; the text was the King James Bible, 1 Timothy, chapter 3, vv 1-7:
"1This is a true saying, if a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. 2 A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; 3 Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; 4 One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; 5 (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?) 6 Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without; lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil."
Nobody can doubt that these are fine principles to abide by, and there are very specific reasons why a Christian preacher should conform to each and every one of them.
Are they relevant to any teacher? Of children - I think so; are they relevant to a University lecturer? And one that isn't of the Bob Jones, Grace or Lipscomb ilk? That's an ideal, though how far does one want to go? Tutor George Roberts (the Development Director for Off-Campus e-learning at Brookes) answered my applying this text (in attempting to put together an inventory about what makes a good online tutor), by asking how blameless we have to be to teach, citing the current Ericsson furore, where, it might be argued, sanctity is expected even of those who teach football.
I certainly believe that key principles derived from the above passage can be applied to tutoring, and if applied to the process of e-moderation, will result in very effective e-moderation indeed.
What's needed is to apply these principles to the current context; I would do so initially by applying them with respect to Scollon's "Maxims of Stance", which are given in our course material (Scollon, 1998). The gist of this calls for consideration initially to be given to the "channel". I take this to mean the medium of communication - is it possible to do what we wish to do, or need to do, as tutors, in the environment offered, and how should we go about it.
The next consideration refers to "relationships" - the practice of refining interaction between tutors and students so that it becomes productive in terms of meeting learning objectives. The final consideration is the "topic", or subject material. It's significant that this is the final consideration, implying that a good online tutor should meet initial generic online tutoring criteria first; only then can specialist subject knowledge be effectively applied.
I didn't have time to actually do this, stopping short at a series of general principles.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
The Collaborators: Week 2
The activities in the second week were geared towards making us collaborate online.
There are about 30 of us on this course, some from Brookes, but many from much further afield, and now this cohort has been divided into three teams.
In the previous week we needed to study 'icebreakers' - these are activities that are designed to get a group of students who study online to participate in various activities that allow them to get to know each other, and ensure that they are familiar with using the software.
The group task that we've been set this week is quite complicated to understand.
We're told about a task - a task that asked students to compile an annotated list of their 4 favourite, definitive, Web-based, resources that are about good practice in online tutoring.
We then needed to change this task so as to make it suitable for
- a group of students to work on together
- this group to work on together exclusively online
How on earth did we manage?
And did it go better for us as a group, than if we simply worked on this task as individuals?
Though I was initially a little cynical about whether working online as a group would be highly effective, I think it actually worked better for us as a group that had we tackled the task as individuals.
Initially there was a little discussion about team roles, for which we were provided references, such as Belbin. I was soon concerned that this would take our efforts from the actual task, but rapidly we fell into a few key roles.
Things got going rapidly when a group member divided up the task into bit-sized sub-tasks. In my Week 3 exercise, which I'll blog next, we were required to digest just what went on in Week 2, so I can repeat some of my observations in my reflective blog here.
Thus this first step represented a division of the whole task into a 2-D set of tasks: On the X-axis a timeline, which recognised primary, secondary and tertiary tasks, and on the Y-Axis, these groups of tasks drawn out (like a chromatogram) into discrete, easily-accomplished sub-tasks. Jenny from our team defined the list of primary sub-tasks, enabling us to bite.
Aware that my profession is a learning technologist at Brookes, where the course was run, and that I had some experience of being an online tutor, I thought I'd better step in and allocate these tasks to specific members of the group, so that we all could have a much clearer idea of what we should be doing.
The results started pouring in rapidly, and after couple of days we had literally hundreds of postings. We were then faced with what appeared a mammoth task - to distill this lake of information, the result of a huge amount of labour - into a flask that could be passed to the course tutors.
Again, Jenny, and another prolific poster, Fabrizio, were very practical here, in producing a spine document that could be linked to the contributions of others.
It was then a matter of putting this document, and various others contributed by different team members through courseGenie. We're fortunate enough to have a site licence here at Brookes for CG - it's a Word template with a numbers of unique styles and some complex macros. One applies the styles, then the macros render each style - via XML - into HTML.
CG was a little temperamental with the tables, and I had to return to the task whenever I had time throughout the final day when we could submit to the tutors. Eventually I had success and was able to get CG to produce an index which linked the spine document, produced by Jenny and Fabrizio (with the help of others) to the various contributions, such as Anthony's context document (detailing the scenario in which the brief was to be used), and Nigel's detailed critical path.
There are about 30 of us on this course, some from Brookes, but many from much further afield, and now this cohort has been divided into three teams.
In the previous week we needed to study 'icebreakers' - these are activities that are designed to get a group of students who study online to participate in various activities that allow them to get to know each other, and ensure that they are familiar with using the software.
The group task that we've been set this week is quite complicated to understand.
We're told about a task - a task that asked students to compile an annotated list of their 4 favourite, definitive, Web-based, resources that are about good practice in online tutoring.
We then needed to change this task so as to make it suitable for
- a group of students to work on together
- this group to work on together exclusively online
How on earth did we manage?
And did it go better for us as a group, than if we simply worked on this task as individuals?
Though I was initially a little cynical about whether working online as a group would be highly effective, I think it actually worked better for us as a group that had we tackled the task as individuals.
Initially there was a little discussion about team roles, for which we were provided references, such as Belbin. I was soon concerned that this would take our efforts from the actual task, but rapidly we fell into a few key roles.
Things got going rapidly when a group member divided up the task into bit-sized sub-tasks. In my Week 3 exercise, which I'll blog next, we were required to digest just what went on in Week 2, so I can repeat some of my observations in my reflective blog here.
Thus this first step represented a division of the whole task into a 2-D set of tasks: On the X-axis a timeline, which recognised primary, secondary and tertiary tasks, and on the Y-Axis, these groups of tasks drawn out (like a chromatogram) into discrete, easily-accomplished sub-tasks. Jenny from our team defined the list of primary sub-tasks, enabling us to bite.
Aware that my profession is a learning technologist at Brookes, where the course was run, and that I had some experience of being an online tutor, I thought I'd better step in and allocate these tasks to specific members of the group, so that we all could have a much clearer idea of what we should be doing.
The results started pouring in rapidly, and after couple of days we had literally hundreds of postings. We were then faced with what appeared a mammoth task - to distill this lake of information, the result of a huge amount of labour - into a flask that could be passed to the course tutors.
Again, Jenny, and another prolific poster, Fabrizio, were very practical here, in producing a spine document that could be linked to the contributions of others.
It was then a matter of putting this document, and various others contributed by different team members through courseGenie. We're fortunate enough to have a site licence here at Brookes for CG - it's a Word template with a numbers of unique styles and some complex macros. One applies the styles, then the macros render each style - via XML - into HTML.
CG was a little temperamental with the tables, and I had to return to the task whenever I had time throughout the final day when we could submit to the tutors. Eventually I had success and was able to get CG to produce an index which linked the spine document, produced by Jenny and Fabrizio (with the help of others) to the various contributions, such as Anthony's context document (detailing the scenario in which the brief was to be used), and Nigel's detailed critical path.
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Rising waters
Not much time to post to this reflective blog....
I may work on top of a hill, but I had to evacuate my office last Thursday as the neighbouring computer rooms went under water. Now I know why they're called the 'pooled rooms'.
For me, the most unfortunate consequence of this is that I had to miss almost all of the third biennial e-learning conference at Brookes on Friday, so that I could sort out things here - specifically the Teacher Training Agency's QTS skills test centre, which needed re-locating, re-scheduling, etc. All this whilst trying to spend time on the online Tutoring course. It was a tough first week, but the next week is even tougher, involving collaborative learning, teamwork, etc. Rewarding it will be - but it's quite a slog, especially as it's difficult to see exactly what we're aiming for.
I'm now hoping that the mists will clear as more of our sub-group of ten students start posting in the discussion topic set aside specifically for our collaborative exercise.
I may work on top of a hill, but I had to evacuate my office last Thursday as the neighbouring computer rooms went under water. Now I know why they're called the 'pooled rooms'.
For me, the most unfortunate consequence of this is that I had to miss almost all of the third biennial e-learning conference at Brookes on Friday, so that I could sort out things here - specifically the Teacher Training Agency's QTS skills test centre, which needed re-locating, re-scheduling, etc. All this whilst trying to spend time on the online Tutoring course. It was a tough first week, but the next week is even tougher, involving collaborative learning, teamwork, etc. Rewarding it will be - but it's quite a slog, especially as it's difficult to see exactly what we're aiming for.
I'm now hoping that the mists will clear as more of our sub-group of ten students start posting in the discussion topic set aside specifically for our collaborative exercise.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
The course has started...
Waht is this all about?
I've been a 'Learning Technologist' here at Oxford Brookes University for 9 months; I've worked in Learning Technology (LT) for a few establishments, and Brookes is by far the most forward-looking.
Technically, LT at Brookes is largely based on the use of a virtual learning environment, or VLE. We use WebCT. WebCT is supported by the Media Workshop, of which I'm a member; however, I'm not present in the Media Workshop physically: I'm based at the Harcourt Hill Campus, a former teacher training college, which now houses the Education department of Brookes.
In additon to the Media Workshop, another department at Brookes, the Oxford Centre for Staff Learning and Development (OCSLD), is heavily involved in e-learning, although their focus is more on the pedagogy behind e-learning. It's OCSLD who are running this course, which I thought I'd better do, as I have no doubt there'll be numerous gems of useful information that I can pass on to my colleagues at Harcourt. I anticipate that the course will be most interesting.
Well, this is the start, and we've been asked to keep a learning log - and it's been suggested that we might use blogging as a means to do this....so here we are.
Jim
I've been a 'Learning Technologist' here at Oxford Brookes University for 9 months; I've worked in Learning Technology (LT) for a few establishments, and Brookes is by far the most forward-looking.
Technically, LT at Brookes is largely based on the use of a virtual learning environment, or VLE. We use WebCT. WebCT is supported by the Media Workshop, of which I'm a member; however, I'm not present in the Media Workshop physically: I'm based at the Harcourt Hill Campus, a former teacher training college, which now houses the Education department of Brookes.
In additon to the Media Workshop, another department at Brookes, the Oxford Centre for Staff Learning and Development (OCSLD), is heavily involved in e-learning, although their focus is more on the pedagogy behind e-learning. It's OCSLD who are running this course, which I thought I'd better do, as I have no doubt there'll be numerous gems of useful information that I can pass on to my colleagues at Harcourt. I anticipate that the course will be most interesting.
Well, this is the start, and we've been asked to keep a learning log - and it's been suggested that we might use blogging as a means to do this....so here we are.
Jim
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