Creating and sustaining online discussion

Q. Why is online discussion useful? 
 
Creating opportunities for online discussion is an effective way of supporting students' language skills. Moreover, the majority of both Home and EU students now entering university have grown up with online communication via social networking sites and many expect that their university learning experience will incorporate these technologies.

Online discussion supports learning in the following ways:

• By increasing opportunities for students to read and write about their subject
• By making it easier for less confident students to contribute to class discussion
• By fostering supportive relationships and a sense of community amongst students

Q. How might I incorporate online discussion in my teaching?

There are many ways of introducing online discussion to your students, but before doing so it is important that you clarify how it will support their learning. Simply asking students to share their thoughts and ideas on a blog is unlikely to work unless they can clearly see the reasons for doing so. It's also important that you are prepared to participate in the online discussion as tutor presence is as important online as it is in the physical classroom. Building on the reasons listed above, here are some examples of how you might introduce online discussion:

Create a class blog and post a weekly discussion question

Setting up a class blog is quick and easy, but it can be a powerful way of stimulating discussion with a new group of students. The Postgraduate course at UCA Farnham used a class blog to encourage less confident students to feel connected to the course. At the end of the first lesson, students were asked to upload a link to one of their favourite songs and write a few sentences about why they liked the song. The tutor also shared a link to one of her favourite songs. This activity was a great ice-breaker as it enabled students to share something about which they were passionate and encouraged them to comment on other students' songs. Here are some more suggestions for kick-starting conversation:

7 conversation starters to stimulate discussion

Students who are sometimes too shy to contribute to class discussion often prefer online discussion as they have time to think about what they want to say before sharing it with the group. In addition, providing students with the abiliity to converse with each other online can foster a sense of community around the cohort. The following articles provides further reading about the benefits of creating an online learning community around your course:

4 reasons to build an online learning community
Make the community about your members


Use Twitter to encourage communication and collaboration
 
Despite the exponential increase in the use of Twitter many people are still unaware of its potential to enhance learning and discussion. Several courses at UCA have created a course Twitter account which they use to send messages and share links to useful resources with their students. Here are some tips for using Twitter in the classroom:

60 inspiring examples of Twitter in the classroom
50 ways to use Twitter in the classroom
Using Twitter for teaching and research

Ideas for online group work

I'm in the process of putting together some tips to help tutors set up online learning activities. This post considers ways of introducing online group work.


Q. What are the advantages of online group work?

Image courtesy of flickr user @gavinkeech

A. Providing opportunities for students to collaborate online can significantly extend their opportunities to learn. Students now entering university are often comfortable with communicating online, and constructing a collaborative online learning task can help them develop a range of skills including:

    literacy and grammar
    negotiation
    appropriate online etiquette and language
    presentation
    communication
    team work
    critical thinking


Q. What sort of activities could I create?

Small-group blogs

Blogs are normally associated with individual learning activities, but they are also able to support group work. One example is to divide students into small groups and allocate a blog to each group, and in addition to creating a final presentation ask them to record all the research, inspiration and discussion that happened along the way. The blog provides a linear folio of research and ideas that both the students and the tutor can access in order to track the progress of the project.

Students can use 'tags' to organise their blog posts and indicate the ones that they would like the tutor to mark. Asking students to tag the blog posts that they would like to submit for final review obliges them to critically reflect on the work they have generated before selecting items to be submitted. In addition, tagging can help with the assessment of each group blog as it prevents the tutor from having to scroll through the whole blog looking for tne final pieces of content.


Whole-class blogs and discussion boards

Setting weekly discussion tasks is an effective way of encouraging students to collaborate in between taught sessions. For example, at the end of a session you can set a question for your students to discuss based on what has been covered so far, or on a topic that you want them to research. This question is posted on a class blog or discussion board. The following taught session then begins with a discussion of the content that students have uploaded.

Another variation on this activity is to set up two or three blogs / discussion boards and to post a different question on each. Students' homework is to write a short summary against each of the questions, and their responses are then used as a basis for discussion at the beginning of the next taught session.


Group mind-mapping with Prezi

Prezi is usually used as an alternative to Powerpoint, but it is also a good tool for supporting visual collaboration. Similar to the group blog activity, students work in small groups and are each allocated a Prezi. Each group is asked to gather visual research on a given topic and upload it to their Prezi workspace.

Using the comments feature, students are then asked to comment on and critique the research of other groups. Tutors can also provide targeted formative feedback on each group's work-in-progress and share additional links that they might find useful.

6 Cs of a Digital Pedagogy

Following on from the Higher Education Academy's excellent Digital Humanities summit, I've been doing some thinking around the digital skills that we expect students to acquire.

The digital age has put more information within our grasp than ever before in History. While in many ways this is hugely empowering for students in Higher Education, it also potentially presents quite a serious challenge to their learning process. The era of ubiquitous content is changing the role of educators too, as we need to help students contextualise and critically evaluate the many sources of information with which they are now presented.

In the distant, pre-internet past, there was less information within easy reach. 'Searching' often meant going to the Library and hunting through the bookshelves. I can't be sure, but I suspect that being less inundated with resources perhaps made it easier for students to critique the sources of information at their disposal.

But in an age where information is so readily available there is a danger that a student will aim to try and find the article or blog post that best represents their own opinion, rather than taking the time to reflect and formulate an opinion. As a PhD student myself I am all too often guilty of this, it's much easier to keep searching for that one article that sums everything up perfectly than to write it yourself.

There is a danger that ease of access to information could create a generation of students who aren't sufficiently inclined or equipped to challenge existing knowledge. This increased passivity is arguably being facilitated by the ability of technology to make all the information we could ever want available on demand. So what can we do about it?

One possible strategy is to place critique and questioning at the centre of the learning process. Creating regular opportunities for students to formulate, share and justify their opinions is increasingly important if they are to survive being drowned in a sea of content.


The above is very much a work in progress, but the 6 C model represents my first attempt at developing a digital pedagogy which responds to the problem of 'information overload'. Students 1) consume information about a topic from multiple sources. They 2) compare these sources, then 3) critique and question them in order to assess their relative worth. Students then 4) curate those sources which they judge to be of value, and 5) create a piece of writing in which they give their own opinion about the topic. Finally, they 6) collaborate with their network by sharing their resource, inviting comments and discussion which oblige them to justify their position.

Does this model work for you? What would you add / remove / change?

Visions for the future of Digital Humanities

Earlier this week I was very fortunate to be invited to the Digital Humanities summit hosted by the Higher Education Academy. I don't profess to be anything like an expert in the Digital Humanities (or 'DH' to those in the know), but the HEA had pulled together a group of people whose expertise they believed would be useful in discussing the possible futures for this emerging area of scholarship.

The day consisted of two group-based practical workshops aimed at trying to visualise both current and future interpretations of DH. I had the opportunity to work with some wonderfully creative people, and given my lack of experience in this area it was useful to begin with an attempt to visualise the current landscape.
  
For the first workshop our group used the metaphor of a kitchen to describe DH, with a range of 'ingredients' (digital artifacts, skills etc), 'rules' (policies, legal requirements, IPR etc), 'people' (chef = thought leader, funders = restaurant backers, customers = end users etc). We also put forward the idea of a 'recipe book' in which the recipes might be created using a range of combinations of the above:

The second workshop began with a discussion of the ways in which DH might evolve. Although I don't have a detailed knowledge of DH, I was instantly struck by what I felt were similarities to the Technology Enhanced Learning field. To put it briefly, there has been great enthusiasm (and money) around the TEL field over the last 20 years, but this has more recently begun to give way to a sense of pessimism due to the noticeable lack of evidence that technology has enhanced learning.

Despite the enthusiasm around DH, I can't help but feel that the need to talk about 'digital' humanities as something separate from 'humanities' represents a possible failure of humanities disciplines to embed technology effectively. The similarities with TEL and e-learning are clear: the more the 'digital' is perceived as something separate from the discipline itself the less likely it is to become seamlessly integrated into that discipline.

However, our apparent pessimism soon gave way to rampant creativity! In attempting to visualise a future of DH we used the metaphor of a tapestry, in which the tapestry represents a discipline and the 'digital-ness' is woven seamlessly through. We felt there was a strong skills acquisition element to DH, and these skills were written as post-its and also woven in to the fabric of the tapestry. The need for progress to be driven by pedagogy represented another similarity to the TEL field, and pedagogy was therefore placed squarely at the centre of the tapestry.
 
Having pursued the metaphor to its logical conclusion, my feeling - and perhaps hope - is that in a generation or so DH will cease to exist. Its disappearance will represent the successful integration of the digital into humanities disciplines, facilitated in part by the gradual permeation in the sector of academics with increased digital skills.

Thank you to the Higher Education Academy for allowing us all to get creative, and a big thank you to my #dhtapesty team members for their inspiration and expert weaving! A Storify record of our presentation can be viewed below, and for a full record of the event please use the #teachDH hashtag.

How can Learning Technologists support CPD?

You can always learn something new from the past.

I've just finished reading Julie Hall's excellent article in SEDA Issue 9.1 (Feb 2008) which examined the aspects of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) that were most valued by academic staff:

• talking at meetings, social events, awaydays, and sometimes in the corridor
• involvement with professional networks and Teaching Fellow networks
• talking with students and colleagues

But staff expressed their concern that this valuable time was often not factored into workloads, and was even not physically possible in some environments due to lack of a social space. There was also a tendency for central support units to assume that staff are free to attend CPD sessions when they are not. Julie Hall highlights that that 'development works best when it is contextualised and comes at the right time'.

Staff also indicated that they would like to receive some kind of reward or recognition for their academic practice, stating that:

• 'I'd like someone to notice all the work I'm doing all day and say thank you to me individually'
• 'It's nice to be asked to contribute to the development of new programmes or just be asked your views on something'

So how can Learning Technologists help?

The UK Professional Standards framework encourages 'professional conversation' which, through dialogue, should aim to provide insight into what academics perceive, know, value and discard. Learning Technologists are privileged in their opportunity to work with numerous academics, course teams and professional support departments. Our position provides ample opportunities to engage in professional conversation, so here are five suggestions as to how Learning Technologists can support the aspects of CPD highlighted above:

1. Be talking to staff and congratulating them on experimenting with innovative approaches to enhancing learning and teaching with technology. This will help them feel valued.

2. By sharing relevant experiences of academic staff with other tutors across the university, promoting good practice in a context that is relevant to the tutor's current teaching.

3. By using our knowledge of technology to create short case studies, e.g. video podcast interviews with academics, providing them with a voice and a platform from which to share their experiences.

4. By asking staff for their input into the development of new workshops and training sessions - what do they want and when do they want it?

5. By creating spaces, both physical and online, where tutors can meet and discuss their practice.


References

Hall, J. (2008) 'Time to develop my career? That's a fantasy!' What academics said about their roles and CPD needs and how I tentatively introduced them to professional standards. SEDA Issue 9.1, February 2008, pp. 7-10

Leadership 2.0

Leadership 2.0 from Denise Caron

While going back over inspiration for previous blog posts I came across this thought provoking presentation about 'Leadership 2.0' by Denise Caron. What is Leadership 2.0? The excellent Social Media Garden report by Denovati has some useful soundbites:

"Leadership 2.0: embracing change, being open to experimenting, demonstrating transparency, working collaboratively and creating dialogue. Fostering a culture of innovation. Open to the voice of the people, stimulating sharing, acknowledgement of expertise" (Denovati, 2013)

And why is it important?

"Use of Web 2.0 will only be successful in an organisation if Leadership 2.0 is in place" (ibid.)

"Collaboration and transparency will be the vital business characteristics that will make all the difference in the digital era. Within organisations, co-operation, as opposed to rivalry, will be the main determinant of business success" (ibid.)

Given the growing social complexity in the workplace due to the exponential increase in use of social tools, you could be forgiven for assuming that management structures would automatically move from the pre-internet model of hierarchy towards one of 'wirearchy' as highlighted by Harold Jarche. But this isn't the case. In fact, the 'social media stuff' is still often the job of the intern - you only need to look at the number of internships currently springing up in which the term 'social media manager' is a key responsibility.

The amount of tacit knowledge in an organisation is a huge source of potential innovation (Cook and Brown, 1999). The ability of social tools to enable senior managers to tap in to this creative reservoir presents significant opportunities for senior managers to maximise the creative potential of their workforce. But the recent Altimeter report into The Evolution of Social Business indicates that "only 34% of businesses believed that their approach to social media was connected to the goals and objectives of the business". And more worryingly, "half of all executives are not informed, engaged or aligned with their company's social media strategies in any capacity".

It's no wonder that tools such as Hootsuite, Yammer and others are experiencing such strong growth. There's a long way to go before social business becomes the norm rather than the exception.

References

Cook, S. D. N. and Brown, J.S. (1999) Bridging Epistemologies: The Generative Dance Between Organizational Knowledge and Organizational Knowing. Organisation Science, Jul/Aug 1999, Vol. 10, No. 4. pp.381-400.

Jarche, H. (2013) Wirearchy.

Li, C. and Solis, B. (2013) The Evolution of Social Business; Six Stages of Social Business Transformation. Altimeter Group 

What Higher Ed can learn from Dave Grohl and Sound City

I've just finished watching the excellent documentary Sound City by Foo Fighter and Nirvana legend Dave Grohl. If you get a chance to watch it, do so - it's inspiring. The documentary tells the story of the legendary Sound City studio in Los Angeles, which gave birth to some of the greatest rock albums of all time: Fleetwood Mac 'Rumours' and Nirvana 'Nevermind' to name just two. But during the film, Grohl shares some insights that I feel are of particular relevance to some of the current debates in Higher Education. Let me explain.

Recently, much has been written about the way in which new technologies and pedagogies are causing students (and educators) to question the value of the classroom experience. Martin Weller has raised the possibility of MOOCs as 1st year undergraduate replacement, which the recent HEA report Flexible Pedagogies: Technology-Enhanced Learning proposes that "if students do not perceive traditional lectures and seminars to be valuable from a learning perspective then the age of campus-based education could come to an end". These articles effectively suggest that the combination of affordable personal technology, widespread internet access and availability of free online learning materials could ultimately lead to campus-based lectures becoming a thing of the past.

So what has this got to do with Sound City? One of the key factors contributing to Sound City's legendary status was its refusal to embrace digital recording technology. In the 1990s, digital audio software such as ProTools revolutionised the recording industry by making it possible for anyone to record and produce music in their bedroom. While this can be seen as empowering creativity by lowering the barriers to entry into the music business, the adverse effect is eloquently articulated by one of the Sound City team as 'making it possible for people to get into the music business who had no business getting into the music business'. By removing the filter of having to go into a studio and record music live - with other people - it became increasingly easy for anyone to create average music. 

As the film draws to a close, Grohl explains that one of the most valuable aspects of writing music in a band is the opportunity to develop ideas in real time, with the help of like-minded people. Often there is no pre-determined output other than the desire to make a record, but by exchanging ideas, trying new things, and collaborating with other musicians, it is possible to achieve great things. It is through real-time human collaboration that magic happens, the magic of creating a composition using the fragments of ideas and inspiration that exist in the minds of each musician. Of crucial importance is the need to spend time on this process, creating through experimentation, then refining ideas through negotiation, trial and error.

For me, this is what Higher Education can learn from Sound City and the process of writing music. The one element common to most university experiences is the opportunity to be in a room with like-minded people, all keen to learn and to try new things. When this face-to-face time is used effectively this is where the magic can happen, the 'light-bulb moments' where somebody asks a question and we suddenly understand a concept. Where a discussion takes place that enables us to see something in a whole new light, or from an entirely different perspective. While it is possible to access the same content from home using a computer, without the opportunity to be in a room with people and share the experience of learning we are less likely to experience the magic that comes from collaborating with other human beings.

Higher Education is currently struggling to articulate the value of campus-based education in an age of rapid technological enhancement. If it is able to refocus on the value of an effective tutor in creating engaging learning experiences for students, then campus-based education will survive. But if pedagogical models based on information transmission are allowed to persist then students will vote with their feet.

The tutor has never had more power to determine the fate of the university.