It's great to see that digital communities can be just as complex (the original word I was going to use was dysfunctional but that seemed a little mean) as RL ones. We as a group have been 'discussing' the relative merits of each others involvement in the group activities. I guess it's no surprise that there are degrees of involvement that occur in any group - and one of the interesting things I have seen while lurking away in the background is that most people seem to be lurkers by design rather than on purpose.
Looking at online learning I think it shows how important it is for any facilitator (or should I say curator now?) to recognise that lurkers are likely to be their target audience. Unless assessment grades are determined by quantity of comments (or quality?) how can you measure participation? Do you need to measure participation? Surely the learning outcomes in a digital environment are no different to those in RL - it's not like you have someone observing to ensure you read every word in the textbook people just assume (rightly or wrongly) that you have.
So when you come to my blog (digitally or via your RSS feeder) realise that I appreciate the visit, hope it gives you things to think about and no expectations ...
Saturday, October 6, 2007
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4 comments:
Good title again Mark and I agree with what you are saying. I think there is a much greater role for facilitators in this environment and I believe we could all benefit from paying more attention to this detail rather than worrying about assessments and how much content we post on the Net.
Hello Mark and Graham, I certainly agree with you but if a course is completely online, assessment is a fact of life and needs to be considered.
Yes it's definately interesting noticing that most of your audience are invisible to you isn't it?
Something that several people with some experience of teaching online have said to me is that they have found that participation in online discussions is much higher when the participation is linked to assessment (not surprisingly). If the goal of encouraging participation is the creation of community, will this type of required participation be effective in building community?
On the assessment front, it seems to me that assessment of blog postings/etc. could be tricky. If you have a set of learning outcomes that you want your students to meet, you could assess their postings/comments/etc. against these learning outcomes, but I wouldn't want the job of finding where the relevant content was personally. I guess you could ask your students to submit an email of learning outcomes with attached links to relevant content.
I agree that in an online environment most are "lurkers". In a face to face classroom I think it is really the same. Some students will engage much more than others. With some students it is difficult to even make eye contact never mind get them to volunteer much. Non the less they are usually getting what they need and this is demonstrated whne they complete the assessments of the course. I think the difference in the digital arena is that the teacher/facilitator (whatever) has no clue other than assessment as to whether the student is actually engaging with the course or not.
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