Skip to content

Tag: potcert

POT Cert Week 9: group activities for students and social bookmarking

Published by crumphelen on October 31, 2012

I have to say that I enjoyed reading Chapter 7: Student Activities in the Online Environment and got quite excited by the long list of student activities that Ko and Rossen provide:

  • role playing and simulations
  • summaries and consensus groups
  • experience-based practicum or lab assignment
  • reflective activities
  • just discussion
  • scenarios and case studies
  • peer editing and review
  • peer activities involving guest speakers
  • cross cultural exchanges
  • using the web as a resource

I know I was only expected to read as far as “Reflective Activities”, but I got carried away.

The chapter was also very good in providing solid advice for organising, supervising and assessing group activities. I’m particularly interested to learn how to facilitate effective group activities that prove to be satisfying for all concerned. In my experience of group work, there’s usually some element that doesn’t sit right for someone. Ko and Rossen advocate that it’s “best for the instructor to play a role in dividing students into groups” (p.176) and they further advocate that the online tutor provide some level of supervision to the group. This is to “encourage participation by all group members and ensure that an individual’s contributions to the group are recognized” (p.179).

I recall reading an article earlier in the course, which explained that the key to successful group work is to “design tasks that are truly collaborative, meaning the students will benefit more from doing the activity as a group than doing it alone”. Now, if only I could locate that article…

Continuing on, it was recommended that this week’s post might be about our experiences trying one of the tools for students’ activities, Diigo for example.

I would categorise Diigo as a social bookmarking tool, but the official blurb insists that it’s so much more:

  • A Personal Research Tool
  • A Collaborative Research Platform
  • A Social Content Site
  • A Knowledge-Sharing Community

Although I’m not new to social bookmarking, I’ve only recently become a user of Diigo. I previously started using Delicious, but my bookmarks got wiped out when they were taken over by… heaven knows who. So I’ve just started all over again, but this time with Diigo, and with a few lessons learnt. I use Diigo as my primary social bookmark service and have it automatically export my bookmarks to Delicious, so I now have a backup in case something similar happens again. This is one of the potential pitfalls of using proprietary platforms on the open web. It’s great whilst its working, but you need to have a back up plan for your data if things go wrong. Indeed, only last week Diigo suffered some kind of hacker-attack and the site was down or subverted for a while.

Diigo has the potential to be used not only for bookmarking (social or not), but also for group work by students. This might include peer editing and review activities or indeed facilitating summary and consensus group activities.

Eureka! I just found that article: how to design effective online group work activities.

References:

Bart, M. (2010) How to Design Effective Online Group Work Activities. Available at:http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/how-to-design-effective-online-group-work-activities/

POT Cert Week 6: internet skills and tools – sussing the search algorithms

Published by crumphelen on October 9, 2012

This week of the POT Cert course sees a move away from the course textbook, for the time being at least, to focus on internet skills and tools. As such, I’ve refreshed my fledgling knowledge of HTML (it’s true – just take a look in the page source code), over hauled my RSS feeds in Google Reader, embedded a video in this blog post, and I’ve also taken the Internet Skills Quiz where I scored 11/12. Yes I confess, I can’t name the device that connects your computer to the internet via cable or DSL (like what’s DSL in the first place??). It’s this aspect of internet skills that’s had me thinking this week, especially as the purpose of this week’s post is to “find a video on YouTube […] that teaches something from your class or that teaches you something about teaching online. [And] embed it in your post and comment on it”.

So here it is, despite the ubiquity of access to videos on YouTube, and the fact that for the 3rd consecutive year YouTube was rated 2nd in the influential Top 100 Tools for Teaching and Learning Survey, I have to say that generally I’ve tended to avoid searching for video content on the platform because I just can’t abide the amount of time it takes to find something of real relevance and quality. Typing search criteria into YouTube is like searching for a needle in a haystack, the eager anticipation when you hit the play button, followed by the disappointment 30 seconds later when you realise you’ve selected a turkey. As a consequence, I recently (very recently) set about the task of getting myself  better able to find relevant quality content within YouTube, which incidentally is more like the kind of Internet skill I’m after.

Usually, I just haphazardly favourite videos that I come across, often in other resources. But the question is, how might I better find these video gems for myself? Well, first off it transpires that Google operates YouTube’s search function, which means that it’s possible to search the site more strategically by using Google’s advanced search operators, but even so, you still need to have an understanding of how Google’s search engine works in order to effectively evaluate the results of your search. For example, Google ranks pages based on a technical algorithm that determines the number of links to a page matching a particular search term, and then again to the number of links that in turn link to those pages. However, because the term that I’m interested in, ‘digital literacies’,  signals different things to different people, results are often still of little relevance, so it’s  here that I need to deploy my own agent-based or social algorithms in order to better evaluate the search results. That is, via social networks make use of people or groups of people to guide me to useful resources and also, based on the demands of the particular circumstance, intelligently apply my own mental processes to the results. Agent-based algorithms take account of multifaceted information and  ‘fuzzy logic’, and social algorithms help form not only relationships with data but also relationships with trusted people.

Consequently, the video that I’ve chosen to embed here is based on such a search. I’ve come across the work of the video’s producer before, and it accords well with my take on digital literacies.

Digital Literacies by Lou McGill

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVxnHgeAzf4]

POT Cert Week 5: the online syllabus

Published by crumphelen on October 2, 2012

Chapter 5: Creating an Effective Online Syllabus somehow failed to ‘grab me’ . Unlike previous chapters, it failed to make much of an impression on me. I don’t think I can rightly say why that is either. Maybe it’s because  I haven’t actually taught online (yet) and haven’t designed my course to a sufficient stage as to be thinking about the nuts and bolts of the syllabus. That’s not to say that the information wasn’t useful, it’s just that I don’t think I’m in a position to say exactly what information was most useful, or indeed what information might be considered ‘questionable’.

However, reading the chapter has caused me to ponder how I might best ensure and/or establish that learners have actually read the given texts within the course. In my experience discussions often fall flat because insufficient numbers have actually read the material. This is an aspect that I’m keen to make crystal clear within the syllabus. Does anyone have any advice on this?

You might have already guessed that I took away from the chapter the importance of being clear from the outset in your instructions and your expectations for the course. It can be said that the syllabus sets the tone for the course, and if it’s not well structured and the ‘geography’ of the online environment not clearly explained, a lot of precious time and energy will be wasted in the weeks to come. Here, I liked Ko and Rossen’s idea of producing a narrated guide to quickly help orientate the learners and to alleviate any anticipated difficulties (p.121).

The recording of The Interactive Syllabus highlighted the importance of taking account of the amount of clicking a learner will have to do in order to arrive at the required location and gave practical instruction on how how to design this in. It was very useful.

I’m interested to hear how others found this chapter and what they took away from it.

css.php