When arriving at Topic 4 I had a strong feeling that everyone in our group were becoming a bit overwhelmed (I’m looking at you Pinar) with the amount of work required to complete the course. To lessen the strain on everyone we decided to take on a different route for how to approach the topic were we tried to collect smaller amounts of information but present it in a more approachable way. Thus, our approach to topic four was in short: Less is More.
During our first meeting we agreed on some focus points as before, but then instead of collecting continuing our work in the FiSH template we decided to move to Mindmeister. We agreed that everone should ad something to every focus point and that the Mindmeister should be viewed as a living document. In many ways I think this was a richer experience as it allowed for different perspectives en every focus point and in the end made the result more personal.
Moving on to our presentation, we actually ended up with two of them: one very traditional in the form of a letter to be sent to an imaginary head of studies at an imaginary university, the other in the form of our Mindmeister mindmap. After discussing the matter we decided that we wouldn’t finalize the mindmap, instead it should remain open and anyone who wanted to explore it could also add to it.
In many ways these two presentations were the least ambitious for our group during the course, but on the other hand I think we all really understood how effective the process of collecting knowledge was this time around…and how powerful collaborative learning can be. Even if the end result was a short and very traditional letter, getting a broad abd accessible bank of knowledge from which to choose it’s contents made the writing process highly rewarding. I’m not saying that it was perfect, but at least for me it was kind of an eye-opener how smoothly it all went.
As Kearsley (2000) puts ”it online learning is as much a social activity as an individual one. However, the quality and quantity of interactivity can vary dramatically from course to course.”
Maybe our end result wasn’t very original on topic 4, but we nailed the interactivity and collaboration this time around.
Kearsley, G. (2000). Online education: Learning and teaching in cyberspace. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
