Week 3, Reflections

The complexities of online participation has been highlighted since starting this course and the related emotions as a learner by participating in a shared community space. As an eModerator - finding balance between contributing, responding to posts then letting conversations continue and summarising where applicable.

On this course, the eModerators have done this particularly well through asking questions either to individuals or to the group mid discussion, which encourages reflections and promotes further exchange of ideas. Sharing tips and pitfalls of technology and learning experiences can be very encouraging and helpful in the first few weeks. Managing of discussions either copying, referencing and moving can also prove invaluable. As a participant I have now found that I was becoming a little lost about what I had said where, so having a facility where you can view all your posts and replies is SO helpful.

Jay Cross has posted about tips for community leaders this week, emphasizing that its not about the technology, that learning in social and that we learn by participation so its useful to try and get people experimenting. This works the same for wikis or any other online environment where people are participating and contributions can be read by some or all.

Finding a balance of group activities if on a course, where both active and more reflective participants can each contribute where possible. If participation is going to be assessed, this raises the question of what participation can be assessed, should students / peers be assessing both themselves as others, would providing ratings or marks discourage those who may be finding the adjustment to an online environment harder?

I feel reluctant to assess individually in the first few weeks, I think people need time, space to just simply explore but further in, I think you could run an assessed group discussion task, but I would invite input from the students / peers - explain and explore the issues around why you need to assess and what you think should be assessed. This is harder to do in a more formal course, there is huge disagreement about what to assess, whether formative or summative, how this should be assessed, what kind of evidence is provided by that assessment. Having discussions with other faculties / staff and sharing tips can help. At Surrey we have a cross faculty eLearning Practitioners network and it is very helpful to share ideas in there.

Finally, as an eModerator, continuing to act as participant in other online courses / communities / wikis can be great at continuing to ‘keep it real’.

This entry was posted on 02/03/2008 at 10:46 am and is filed under 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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