This Blog Has Moved!
I've consolidated all my old blogs into a new one, which hopefully I'll be able to keep up with more regularly! Please visit Jim Woodell's Knowledge Common. See you there!
distance education, e-learning and e-teaching, instructional technology, instructional design, faculty development, teacher training, learning objects, module development, course sites, assessment, communities of practice, collaborative tools, groupware, intranets, online communities, knowledge management, collaboration, community building, databases, virtual teams, and more...
I've consolidated all my old blogs into a new one, which hopefully I'll be able to keep up with more regularly! Please visit Jim Woodell's Knowledge Common. See you there!
From Cats in the classroom: Online learning in hybrid space, posted on FirstMonday:
It is not necessary for all of us to look at the same ugly carpet to create knowledge together successfully.In this article by Michelle Kazmer, there's an interesting exploration of the idea that people who are learning together online are sharing an online space (or "place," as Michelle prefers to call online classrooms) while at the same time all occupying physical spaces. She points out that these physical spaces have an effect on what the virtual learning space becomes:
students occupy online space at the same time they are occupying and engaging with their local physical space; and the circumstances of their physical surroundings shape the shared online space.This article made me think of my previous post, in which I pointed out that I cross paths with all these people who are busy doing other things, but then we all end up in a meeting together. People in online classrooms are crossing paths, too. And just as our awareness, in the physical world, of where people have been and where they are going can help us shape community, I suspect that awareness of others' physical spaces can contribute to community building, too. I wonder if Nancy White would call this another community indicator?
Inspiration this morning came from discovering Nancy White's liberal use of the Technorati tag 'community_indicators'. I enjoyed reading a blog entry she pointed to about "community of the path" (Debra Roby) and it got me to thinking about how I cross paths with so many at work, usually in meetings, and how we all get intertwined through a few overlapping responsibilities, and also how we choose to interact with one another at those crossover points.
A few months ago, I was reading the book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach. It's a great book, and has nothing to do with educational technology, but the word "disembodied" appeared in it a lot. The use of that word was quite literal in this book, but it kept reminding me of the less literal use of the word as it's often bandied about in describing the experiences of online learners.
For Merleau-Ponty, there can be no experience outside the body and he would conclude that any warning about the dangers of disembodied experiences are pointless because such a thing is not possible.The reviewer's overall point is that any new technology goes through this long period of misconception and myth. Can we please move beyond this period soon for online learning? It makes my job difficult when I discover that many of my colleagues have a mental model of online learning as I talk to them about how we might advance our goals related to it. As I'm talking with them about which courses and programs we might offer online, I often forget that in their mind this is a second-rate learning approach, and one that will end forever the close, personal relationships that students and faculty will have.
I've been enjoying a current thread on the EDUCAUSE Instructional Technology (INSTTECH) listserv about blogging versus discussion boards as tools for teaching and learning. The whole thread harkens back to posts (see posts on 9/8/2004, 9/12/2004, and 9/14/2004) here and elsewhere about this topic. I remain fascinated by the thinking going into the use of blogs as instructional tools, and also tools for development of communities.
A while back, a colleague of mine and I wrote about Diffusion of Innovation theory and how it might relate to faculty development. Truth be told, we were familiar with Everett Rogers's work on diffusion of innovations and read a lot of secondary sources related to it, but neither of us had ever picked up the book Diffusion of Innovations and read it. I finally bought it recently, and I'm finding it infinitely readable for an academic book. And the most recent edition just came out, so it's got lots of up-to-date examples and includes references to recent adaptations of the theory, including Malcolm Gladwell's stuff (Tipping Point) and others.