I’m returning to my exploration of BlendKit 2011. This week, the readings are so relevant to the discussion at UC Davis that I decided to blog twice: first about the readings and then about the activities.
Some local history sets the context for my thoughts in this discussion. UC Davis, I am learning, places high value on research and assumes that a main benefit to students who attend UC Davis is the interaction with research faculty who teach classes. Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get more or less cynicism about the quantity and quality of that interaction. Regardless, the point is that interaction is a key value for students and instructors at our institution. Any online learning tool must either improve or increase the interaction between students and instructors, or we reject it because it degrades the value of a UC Davis education. (I realize that the previous sentence covers a lot of ground, and I’ll qualify it by saying that “improve” includes situations in which perhaps interaction stays the same but content or skill mastery increases. Here I could go off into the fearsome wilds of quality definitions, but I refrain. Today’s post is about interaction.)
The readings for this week discuss three kinds of interaction (student-content, student-instructor, and student-student) and two motivations for interaction (extrinsic and intrinsic). Extrinsic motivation, the authors say, has to do with the benefits of an expert guide. Despite evidence that learning is co-constructed, it can be ineffective to let learners simply wander around a field of knowledge with neither guidance about how to organize the content nor discipline about how or how much to practice the skills. Research faculty, as experts, are appropriately placed to provide such guidance. Especially with emerging tools for online interaction, research faculty can design a course to provide more and higher quality interaction than they might have been able to in a large lecture hall.
The readings give four models of the expert-guide role that faculty might fill: atelier, network administrator, concierge, and curatorial. The two most useful for me were the atelier and curatorial learning models. The atelier model, like an art studio, means the instructor provides a public space for learning so that learners and instructor can see each other’s work, and learners can learn from instructor comments on other learners’ work. Blogs work particularly well for this goal, as does a new tool I just learned about: Doceri, which allows for projected whiteboard screensharing and mobile control of instructional board space. (I could see it working really well in a blended course because it could be used in the face-to-face classroom and remotely, both synchronously and asynchronously.) The curatorial model, like either a museum or an historic site, means that the instructor creates a space where knowledge can be created, explored, and connected. The way the instructor organizes the learning space demonstrates the conceptual architecture or interpretation of the field. The example I can think of here is a blended course in art history that a Davis faculty member has taught for 10 years. Students interact with content modules on their own, and then they attend a face-to-face discussion in medium-sized groups so that they can work personally with the instructor and other students on interpretation of the content.
The final point in the BlendKit readings is a rare but important consideration of privacy issues that arise in new forms when using online learning tools such as blogs. There are several useful examples of how to handle FERPA issues in a syllabus.
Questions to ponder (reposted from BlendKit2011 under Creative Commons license):
- Is there value in student-to-student and student-to-instructor interaction in all courses regardless of discipline?
- What role does interaction play in courses in which the emphasis is on declarative knowledge (e.g., introductory “survey” courses at the lower-division undergraduate level) or, similarly, in courses that cultivate procedural knowledge (e.g., technical courses requiring the working of problem sets)?
- As you consider designing a blended learning course, what kinds of interactions can you envision occurring face-to-face, and how might you use the online environment for interactions? What opportunities are there for you to explore different instructional strategies in the blended course than you have in the past?
- What factors might limit the feasibility of robust interaction face-to-face or online?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
“The curatorial model, like either a museum or an historic site, means that the instructor creates a space where knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.”
I really appreciated your illustration of the atelier and curatorial models with examples from your institution! (Thanks for mentioning Doceri, by the way. I hadn’t heard of it and looked forward to checking it out!) You know, these days, it’s hard for me to hear “curation” without thinking of the kind of content curation practiced by many of those participating in “Personal Learning Networks” within the Web2.0/social media space. What kind of a role, if any, do you see for such activities (not just the tools themselves) in blended courses at UC Davis?
Good question, Kelvin. I hadn’t even made the connection between curation and the personal learning networks until you pointed it out. I had been thinking of the instructor as curator, which the instructor could be with or without the content curation on a site like http://www.scoop.it. However, an instructor could also teach students to be curators, especially with tools like ScoopIt, essentially expecting them to practice evaluating and organizing resources to create something new–a pretty high level skill. This reminds me of a conversation I had with two history faculty members here at UC Davis who are currently developing a course on America in the 60s. Their goal for the class is that students will learn to “do history,” that is, create interpretations based on rigorous discussion of primary texts as real historians do rather than just read textbooks and memorize facts. It seems to me that this is a great example of the curation model, one that encourages students to interact with content, instructors, and other students. And online learning tools can provide both the access and the structure for such interaction in a way that likely would not happen in a traditional lecture hall…unless there is a blended aspect to the class, to which students go when they leave the lecture hall. I believe the history faculty are already using that model; I think I remember them discussing using http://digg.com in their course design.