I was still getting those annoying group emails these days. A community created an email list and all or part of the members can send the group emails. It did enhance the efficiency of the information sharing, but sometimes those emails might be just annoying.
Whenever I got this kind email, I was always thinking that we should get a group blog, so that the non-important information can just be shared online and whenever the community members have time, they can just open the browser and visit it by themselves.
The blog wins for its non-synchronicity. And the learners have its choice of time to learn.
But sometimes, if we are not an active learner, or we are not used to learn with computer's assistance, the learning blogs might be not helpful at all. Take this blog for example, there might be someone forgets to view the blog and post their homework on time, but it’s not their fault. Since our computer never knows when to visit this blog and when life is getting busy, visiting blog might be list in the bottom of our doing-list. Then this blog learning can be very negative.
How to enhance the collaboration? Instructor plays the major role and as an instructor(I assume that most of us will be an instructor someday in near future), we may need to:
1. Send the notification email
If the blog is a blog for reading and commenting purpose, then we might need to send some notification email for students if the “deadline” is drawing near.
2. Encourage students commenting
It’s common that if student A comments on student B's post and B will comment back to A’s blog post. If the whole class is doing comments, the blog will be alive and interesting.
So encourage the class to comment each other and I believe that commenting each other is a magic tool to bring the blog alive.
3. Ask help
As an instructor, it might be a powerful role in the class. Asking help can bring close to students, to show the instructor is the same as students and we both sometimes need help.
The best result is the students are willing to offer helps and solve the problem. The worst is no one answers and the blog dies at where it started. There is a risk here but worthy to try it out.
4. Make another account.
It's not an honest way but if the learning blog is really inanimate and no one jumps up to say anything, making up another account is doable choice for setting up a learning environment. People sometime don't join the discussion because they might think it is awkward to discuss since no one else is doing that.
Alright...that's all what I can think about this topic without checking any other references.
I am sure there are many issues in this topic and collabarative learning is getting popular these days.
One of the ICS professors is doing the research on this topic and here is his group website:
http://0-lilt.ics.hawaii.edu.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/lilt/
Hope it is helpful for our learning group!
Liu Liu
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Wow! A very insightful and extensive posting. I'm completely speechless on the detail and passion you have for this topic. I agree that if a student does not check the blog, then it provides very little effectiveness for the class.
Post a Comment