After two inspiring weeks of seminars with my peers on the topic “learning in communities” it’s time to write a few words. All the peers of our group are excellent participants and it has been a wonderful experience to lead the work on this topic together with Stephanie and with support from our facilitators. I think we’ve done exactly what is expected in a community: everyone contributes in different but always constructive ways to reach the aim. Therefore we’ve shared a lot of different aspects of the topic such as definitions, ideas, reflections, digital tools that may be useful for learning together – and ended up with listening to the song “We are here” by Alicia Keys! (which associates to community… I found it inspired by the list of songs that Stephanie passed over to us all via whatsapp) and place our final presentation on the onl202 page.
In the beginning of the process my role was a kind of secretary of our google-doc and since my peers knew more than me about how to handle it, I learnt a lot about this digital resource. Once again thanks to all my peers of pbl-group 6!:)
Our first task was to define differences and resemblances between the concepts “network” and “community”. Stephanie did a great job producing word clouds where our ideas could be seen. In this way we all contributed from the beginning. Then, after the interesting lecture by Kay Oddone, we talked about the main issues: how to engage students and make them see the advantages of connected learning and how to encourage them to participate in a constructive and meaningful way.
In my opinion, the ways of contributing in our group has helped me to understand how the student groups may work: all members of a group should participate but it is important to remember that they participate in different ways. The important issue for the teacher is to construe tasks and exercises that “force” everyone to engage and in which different skills are relevant. In short, the key word for the teacher is “meaningful” and this sense of meaning has to be communicated to the students.
In this way, the former “gap” between campus and online communities is less significant. But I’m not implying that campus activities are less meaningful, I just say that I have to reflect a lot more upon design to make meaningful tasks for online learning. In short, meaningful work online is also meaningful on campus but the opposite is not always the case. An example for this is something that happened in my class (Spanish for beginners) a few days ago. The students were supposed to practice a telephone conversation. If they had done that on campus it would probably have been by reading or traducing a text from Swedish into Spanish. Now, as an online activity, I construed some comments of the conversation in Spanish and the students had to invent the other half of the conversation in a coherent way. This task engaged them all to work in zoom breakout rooms and by the end of the session they presented different conversations depending on their skills and level of Spanish. All of them looked so happy:) and to me this was a great pedagogical and didactic reward!
During the process one of my peers shared an article about online learning that I found interesting:
https://hbsp.harvard.edu/inspiring-minds/online-learning-can-still-be-social
Then, Brindley, Blasche & Walti (2009) propose that “rather than focus on the grading of collaborative group projects, instructors should incorporate a variety of instructional strategies to improve the quality of group collaboration and to increase the likelihood of student participation.” These strategies are:
- Facilitate learner readiness for group work and provide scaffolding to build skills,
- Establish a healthy balance between structure (clarity of task) and learner autonomy (flexibility of task),
- Nurture the establishment of learner relationships and sense of community,
- Monitor group activities actively and closely,
- Make the group task relevant for the learner,
- Choose tasks that are best performed by a group,
- Provide sufficient time.
I read the article on the onl202 page. These strategies will be kept in mind for my classes and I think they’ve been a useful orientation for the work on topic 3 in the pbl group.