Week 6 - Joanna

Joanna gave a fantastic presentation in the virtual conference room last night about her new Google Group. Joanna is teaching a Freelance Journalism course and is using Google Groups to provide her students with access to resources as well as an opportunity for discussion between classes. She has customised the site with a great graphic and provided easy to follow instructions. The whole group have joined and some are actively participating. She mentioned that she had posted eight times while her students had posted only four times. What followed was a comment that this is a pretty good ratio for a brand new forum.

Joanna's presentation was supported by a web tour and a Powerpoint slide show. She spoke confidently and seemed quite at ease in the conference room which was great to see. Participants were interested in what she had to say and there were lots of questions. There was a lot of discussion about text chat:

- it's distracting (yes it is!)
- it's fun
- it's a way of asking lots of questions without interrupting the faciltator.

We discovered that you can actually mute text chat from participants. I suppose this is a way to focus the group. However I noticed that most of the questions and lots of the responses came via the text chat so I wonder what the effect of removing this feature would be on participation. Maybe we can try it.

This week began our participant faclitation of the Moodle forum began. Each pair will facilitate for one of the next five weeks. Engagement in the forum to date has been minimal but this week was active and interesting. There were four discussions:

Motivating students to complete on line learning
Time for us all to be on LinkedIn
Learning Styles and E-learning
Uptake of E-learning.

One participant was trialling a toolbox learning object with two students, one of whom decided early on that e-learning was really not for her. She was expecting to learn about teaching in the same way that you might learn computer skills online. The volume of reading was overwhelming and she withdrew favouring a face to face approach. The other student however stuck with it and has almost completed her tasks. The conclusion of our forum discussion was that the structure and language were to complex. It will be interesting to hear what the other student felt about the environment.

There was a bit of discussion about the value of joining social networks where opposing views were voiced. Some are already in, and love it, while others are dabbling and are not yet convinced!

Next was a discussion about e-learning styles followed by the final topic - Uptake of E-learning. I thought that both these topics had the potential to become great discussions. It was the first time I had seen passionate posts, posts with substance, posts with great questions. I am going to try to keep these discussions going beyond their week and am hopeful that people will continue to engage.

My final comment about yesterday is triumphant! During our virtual conference session we talked about the pros and cons of forum discussions and one of our number said

"this is all new - we, the teachers, need to lead..."

Thanks Ken, you can come back! :)