We easily fall into the groupwork mode from school and divide tasks between us, but this don’t allow collaborative inquiry and collective responsibilitiy. How could a learning community help participants to become part of a learning community and collaborate with their peers?

In my experience the connections between participants is in a star-network dependent on one central node. The groupwork mode allow members to cluster in hubs-and-spouts, but in an distributed-network. The star-network reduces the probability of a network failure by connecting all of the peripheral nodes to a central node, but this node also allow failure for the network.

To be continued…

During Topic 2: Open Learning – Sharing and Openness I looked at some chapters in Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Teaching and Learning by Tony Bates (2014). He emphasizes decision-making in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

“Although governments, institutions and learners themselves can do a great deal to ensure success in teaching and learning, in the end the responsibility and to some extent the power to change lies within teachers and instructors themselves. It will be the imagination of teachers inventing new ways of teaching that will eventually result in the kinds of graduates the world will need in the future.” (Bates 2014)

My personal interest has been on the affordances of collaborative learning in online environments and I developed a Collaborative Open Online Learning (COOL) course. The course use microcredentials (i.e. open badges) as a way to recognize skills and achievements. Distributed knowledge (instead of a central node in a star network) are stored in Open Educational Resources (OERs), which is blended and re-mixed to student’s local context. My belief is that someone with expert skills can find patterns between and traverse key concepts and knowledge domains (i.e. salient properties of an entity).  He or she can also demonstrate and validate this knowledge in a Community of Practitioners (Brown and Duguid 2002). Notice the focus on knowing-in-practice where practitioners from different contexts learn from each other as they try to address similar real-life problems.

An analogy I find helpful is literature circles. They were first implemented in 1982 by Karen Smith, providing a way for students to engage in critical thinking and reflection. Research have found that peer collaboration has a positive effect on student learning and performance as well as improved reading comprehension and content-knowledge (Daniels, 2002).

Compared to a book club a literature circle Includes assessment of fellow group members (i.e. peet-to-peer review) and opportunity to keep track of your own progress though self-assessment. Literature circles offers an alternative to teacher-centered discourse, but it is recommended to agree on checklists or other rubrics to provide structure. Collaborative learning in a digital age allow members to write reflective blog posts and Activity Tracker (which was used in previous iterations of the ONL course).

As participants in ONL181 you can probably understand my interest in Open Online Learning. I think we as educators need to focus on assessment and distinction between literacy and fluency!

On the subject of open learning I have used Scalable Learning that is provided for free for individual teachers (here is also experiments with LTI integrations with Canvas LMS)

References:

• Bates, T. (2015). Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Teaching and Learning.
• Brown JS, Duguid P (2002) Local knowledge: Innovation in the networked age. Management Learning 33(4): 427–437.
• Daniels, H. (2002). Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups. Maine: Stenhouse Publishers.

An explorer attempts to predict the relationship between two points (i.e. regression line). An observer tend to survey from two known points at either end of a fixed baseline (i.e. triangulation). An engineer focus on discerning patterns and regularities in data (i.e. pattern recognition). This involve actively forming our own thoughts through self-exploration and discuss our observations.

During our first topic I’ve spent time to rethink the metaphor of a co-facilitator as a Learning Improvement Engineer. In the reading I found “No longer are we just facilitating students so that they can perform (qualification), but we must also ensure that they are being socialised (socialisation) into a ‘way-of-being’ (subjectification) that includes attributes and skills to take risks, to reason critically, to reflect, to be resourceful, and to be autonomous – qualities of lifelong learners – which will allow them to work and live productively in a world of uncertainties” (Kek & Huijser 2015). Looking at Problem-Based Learning for Transformation and Social Reform “facilitators awaken students’ embedded perspectives as well as the values and ideologies located in texts and common practices within their disciplines” (Savin-Baden 2014). The table over Constellations of Problem-Based Learning describes the Form of Facilitation (p. 203) as:

• Coordinator of knowledge and skills
• Orchestrator of learning opportunities
• Enabler of group reflection
• Decoder of cultures

Investigation: The facilitator provides one important source of scaffolding, but how might technology extend the human facilitator in larger groups?

I’m going to take a systematic approach based on a human ecology for learning model (adapted from Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006)

What if digital technologies can support course design and extend opportunities for collaboration, engagement and learning? What if collaborative and open online learning can create an understanding of the value, possibilities and challenges of using digital tools to support teaching and learning?

This year iteration of Open Networked Learning (#ONL181) is about to start! As a previous participant in #ONL172 I’m acting as a co-facilitator that help participants to climb the thresholds of technology and tackle challenges of the course. We are about 150 people in the community with 120 participant in 15 PBL groups from three countries.

The groups will explain, discuss and assess the shared topic and then use the created content in the community to critically reflect on questions concerning eLearning related to their own teaching practice.