What is knowledge? A social construction? That the Earth (approximately) is a globe and that E = mc2 are in my not so humble opinion non-negotiable facts, at least until science finds facts that proves them false. Other areas of human knowledge may be, at least for the moment, more open to new results, debate, interpretation and contextualization.
The Earth isa globe, Photo: NASA (1)
One such field is learning. I saw brain researcher Dr. Lara Boyd in a TEDx talk explain that the also the adult human brain is subject to reconstruction as a result of learning and that is promising.(2)
Your brain is still reconstructing itself to handle new knowledge
The topic for this and next week is Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning. A promising tool for learning is a PLN, Personal Learning Network.(3)(4)(5)
PLN, Personal Learning Network
Your PLN can consist of different resources. Other learners, experts, texts, images, movies databases some locally available others spread around the world and accessible through different means of communications.
Your PLN contains different sorts of resources spread over the world.
Sometimes we use the words community and network as synonyms but there is a reason to keep them separated. Then we reserve the word community for a more structured and permanent constellation and network for a more ad hoc constellation around your personal goals. A community can be part of your network.
Keep the words community and network separated
Connectivism
Connectivism is a way to explain how people learn (6). It explains learning as creating connectionsbetween nodes.
Learning as connecting nodes.
Nodes can according to Siemens be be
“
- · content (data or information)
- · interaction (tentative connection forming)
- · static nodes (stable knowledge structure)
- · dynamic nodes (continually changing based on new information and data)
- · self-updating nodes (nodes which are tightly linked to their original information source, resulting in a high level of currency
- · emotive elements (emotions that influence the prospect of connection and hub formations).”
Frustrating!
Collaborative on-line learning can be frustrating. According to Capdeferro and Romero (7) the most common sources of frustration are “Commitment imbalance, unshared goals, communication difficulties and negotiation problems”. My experience from my student years back in late seventies and early eighties is that she same applies to ordinary on campus non-digital group work. and by about the same reasons. As one student pointed out “Some people just want to pass courses while some others only want to be the best one.” I think it would be interesting to compare between two courses one on campus and another on-line with the same content, teachers and comparable student groups.
Does grading make group work more effective?
Brindley, Walti, and Blaschke (8) has studied if students became more active in group work if they got graded and found no correlation. They point out some other strategies that instructors should focus on:
1. Facilitate learner readiness for group work and provide scaffolding to build skills.
2. Establish a healthy balance between structure (clarity of task) and learner autonomy (flexibility of task).
3. Nurture the establishment of learner relationships and sense of community.
4. Monitor group activities actively and closely.
5. Make the group task relevant for the learner.
6. Choose tasks that are best performed by a group.
7. Provide sufficient time.
Maybe the studied student population may have impacted the results. Students in Master of Distance Education may be (or become) more motivated for on-line group work than average students.
How to act as an instructor in an asynchronous forum?
Mazsolini and Maddison (9) studied student – teacher interactions in an asynchronous forum. Should the instructors take a prominent role, be more a guide or keep a very low profile. They found weak or no correlation between the students learning activities and the instructor behaviour, but students considered the more active instructors more enthusiastic and expert.
A methodological problem is that the study uses length of threads as an indicator of more or deeper learning. I have been using asynchronous BBS, USENET, mailing-lists, forums and Facebook-groups since early eighties. I consider long threads often correlated to bad network behavior like trolling, bikeshedding(10), not reading the thread before answering, ad hominem-arguments and polarized discussions wich doesn’t converge.
Resources
1. Earth – Apollo 11 [Internet]. [citerad 06 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/a11_h_44_6552.html
2. After watching this, your brain will not be the same | Lara Boyd | TEDxVancouver [Internet]. [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNHBMFCzznE
3. ONL202 Topic 3 Learning in communities [Internet]. [citerad 04 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://padlet.com/alacre/5monn8ds0wrtwck4
4. PLNs Theory and Practice [Internet]. 2019 [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8mJX5n3IEg&feature=youtu.be
5. PLNs Theory and Practice part 2 [Internet]. 2019 [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqSBTr9DPH8&feature=youtu.be
6. Siemens G. Connectivism: Learning as Network-Creation. 01 januari 2005;
7. View of Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences? | The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning [Internet]. [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1127/2129
8. View of Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment | The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning [Internet]. [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/675/1271
9. Mazzolini M, Maddison S. Sage, guide or ghost? The effect of instructor intervention on student participation in online discussion forums. Comput Educ. 01 april 2003;40(3):237–53.
10. Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? [Internet]. [citerad 06 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: http://bikeshed.com/
