Martin Terre Blanche y Sebastian Fiedler exponen ideas muy interesantes. ¿Tal vez están pensando en una comunidad de bloggers, más allá de las paredes del aula? Parece que hay mucha gente dándole vueltas a las mismas ideas. Buena señal.
Over the past 9 months or so I have had some fun (with the help of colleagues and students in the psychology and other departments at Unisa) looking into, downloading, trying out and programming various bits and pieces of software that might help us build collaborative learning environments. Some of what we have learnt in the process is reflected in the Collaborative Learning Environments Sourcebook.
One thing I think I've learnt from this is that buying into (or developing) a single "juggernaut" system would be a bad idea. Why? Because increasingly learning happens in the context of real-world networks, projects, agendas; and even where it can be distinguished as a separate activity, learning is now more likely to be of the just-in-time rather than the just-in-case variety. In such a world, people do not want to go through long, complicated sign-up procedures to gain access to (or subject themselves to learning the arcane conventions of) specialised educational software. They want to use the regular tools of the knowledge trade; and when new tools are introduced, they want to be able to continue using them long after they are no longer officially signed up as students. So Blackboard or WebCT (or their excellent open source equivalents) won't do - not even with added "collaboration features". So what should we be offering students? Here's my partial list:
- Functions built on top of generic tools they already have. Computer-literate students can do the word processing and e-mailing thing blindfolded and we should use this, while also pointing them to advanced functionality already built into the software (and perhaps offering some useful add-ons/plug-ins). For example, few students (or anybody else for that matter) fully exploit the functionality in the address book functions of e-mail programs. Creative use of the distributed database formed by students' address books can be more powerful than some centralised course-specific student database, plus students gain contact management skills and tools that have value beyond the course environment.
- Protocols to be applied with generic tools. Simple things like encouraging (or enforcing) a set of conventions for the subject lines of e-mails that pass between participants in a course (or showing students how to use more than one software communication channel in parallel) can do a lot to facilitate collaborative learning.
- Easy access to and instruction in using widely-accepted, but less well known tools. Some very useful collaboration tools, such as blogs for example, have not yet reached the level of popularity where most computer-literate students are familiar with them. When we use such tools in our courses, students do have to go through a learning curve, but they're not learning how to use some education-specific system. They are becoming part of a much larger community of people who use the tool.
- Course or institution-specific indexing, networking and linking tools. In a collaborative learning environment, students want to interact with others working in the same field of enquiry as themselves - so need some means of finding or forming a cluster of people within the larger universe of students in a course, or in a university, or in the world; they also need to be able to keep track of developments in the cluster. The wrong way is to force everybody in a cluster to be post their contributions via the same educational software system. The right way is to use everyday tools such as blogs and RSS syndication, which make contributions available in an interoperable way. What we as collaborative learning environment developers might profitably do, is to devise useful ways of indexing and grouping and routing this information, so that participants can link up with others at those points that are most relevant to them. So, concretely: In a research methods course each student (or group of students) could maintain a blog about their research project, each with its own RSS feed. A simple indexing system would simply be a list of links to the blogs of all the students in the course - not very sophisticated, but it does add some value. A more useful index would group blogs together where students are researching similar topics or using similar methodologies. We could do this by hand, but could also develop automated aggregating tools that read each blog's feed and distill everything into a smaller number of topic (or methodology) specific feeds. There are of course many such indexing, linking and aggregating services already, but most still use fairly crude forms of aggregating. I expect to see more and more specialised and novel ways of linking and grouping learners and their learning products - and that a key differentiator for 'quality' courses will become the level of sophistication of the networking tools they offer. [Martin Terre Blanche]
Hey, Martin's post fits so nicely with what I posted only minutes ago. It sounds like Martin follows the same line of thought here when he writes...
"They want to use the regular tools of the knowledge trade; and when new tools are introduced, they want to be able to continue using them long after they are no longer officially signed up as students. So Blackboard or WebCT (or their excellent open source equivalents) won't do - not even with added 'collaboration features'."
I also think that Martin lists very crucial features for a learning environment and tool design that allows for collaboration, self-organization, and (in the long run) individual empowerment and end-user modification.
Martin is right. For these type of setups we need to support and leverage...
- Functions built on top of generic tools they (people, students, teachers, etc.) already have
- Protocols to be applied with generic tools
- Easy access to and instruction in using widely-accepted, but less well known tools.
- Course or institution-specific indexing, networking and linking tools.
[Seblogging News]