So where did this week go…………

Difficult to manage time this week and tired from the amount of time I have spent in front of a pc, will definitely do less next week. Self-defeating anyway, in that the more time you spend in front of a screen makes you tired in itself.

Online Tutor Course
Participating in online tutor course took on a new flavour this week as we were divided into 2 small groups and asked to put an argument together along the lines of whether participation should be compulsory or not. We were then tasked with putting a small presentation together on a wiki. Within my group I think that I was the only one who had edited a wiki before so I think for some of the group - have managed to find their way around a VLE and getting used to feeling part of a community - being able to post some comments in a discussion - then asked to go further and try and manage this via a wiki…

Its difficult to remember how I felt when I first used a wiki, one of our group remarked that it felt intrusive to be editing someone else’s entries. It is true and because you are using editing a document, you can’t explain to the person whose entry you are editing, your justification for doing so - you just do it. Its good that in just over two weeks, the community is able to respond to each other and even able to do some very basic wiki editing is great.

So should participation be compulsory? We didn’t come to a conclusion on this. People participate online in different ways, logging in and looking at discussions or reading is participating. Also observing others behaviour and then applying it to future practices is a form of participation. These more reflective forms of participation are impossible to assess and do you even need to assess participation? We have a ‘backup’ on this course which is recording your thoughts on the week in a log (which I am doing here) so a course tutor could go and analyse from any personal contributions on their log.

I don’t think you need to ‘assess’ participation in a formal sense - but that is difficult for tutors who are making an online element a key area of the course, it stems from - we want to help people find their way around an online environment, we want them to have a go at actively participating because we have seen benefits for ourselves, but it comes down to their motivation for studying and probably how much time they are prepared to study. Some of this also comes down to money - when I did my CIW, I funded it myself so did participate very actively because I needed to justify the investment to myself, even if I did lose the majority of evenings and weekends for over a year.

This week, Stewart Mader has continued his wiki adoption in 21 days series and is asking whether wiki patterns and anti-patterns apply elsewhere - I think they do apply across a range of online experiences. I am ‘guilty’ of both anti and positive wiki patterns myself when struggling to find the balance between intervention and letting things flow against a timeline. However I do not believe that online patterns of behaviour e.g. on a wiki or other online ‘thing’ are a permanent state of affairs, yet again, some of these simply arise from using an environment and technology to get online for the first time e.g.

“Antipatterns are patterns that represent a negative behaviour or consequence. They describe situations that you’d rather didn’t occur, but that are common nonetheless.

The most important part of an Antipattern is the refactored solution, which answers the question: “If we find ourselves in this situation, how best can we extricate ourselves from it and get back on track?”

Second Life and MUVEs
Attended the ALT labs group open day this week where there were some demos and discussion around virtual worlds, serious games. I am currently putting together a small paper on pedagogical benefits of MUVEs and it does seem to date that Second Life is where most educators have experience to date. In order to find, understand something like Second Life, there is a huge amount of information out there - videos, wikis, blogs, papers - but it takes AGES AND AGES to scroll through lists of resources and look at them, then go to another list of resources and go through them. You could easily spend an entire year and that’s just Second Life. I only discovered the Salamander wiki project this week, which I wish I had found 3 weeks ago - but they are finding what they are calling learning materials objects in Second life and categorising them by learner engagement types. Its a brilliant resource which I have only just started to peek into, if you are trying to find out about learning experiences this is a good place to start before attempting to wade through everything else.

I attended my first small group meeting in Second Life, it was quite mad meeting one of the students who is here at Surrey, for the first time online instead of F2F or whatever. In terms of others MUVEs I personally have found it difficult to find much evidence of other educators doing things - some corporate learning is being done using Olive (recently received an IEEE award, I saw at Serious Virtual Worlds and it is great), and I guess very soon with IBM’s Active Worlds, but am continuing this over next week to try and find out some more.

This entry was posted on 24/02/2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under virtual world, Technology, eLearning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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