I have been in San Francisco at the American Educational Research Association conference since Saturday. Many of the sessions have lulled me to sleep; however, I have been pleasantly surprised by the technology-focused sessions with interactive presenters and well-designed presentations.
I attended a fascinating session this morning about online discussion forums. The first presenter talked about speaking and listening in discussion forums. She focused on listening rather than lurking because listening is a productive behavior. The presenter found that people who revisited other students' posts multiple times were less likely to respond (because they understood the post better than just visiting once). Also more discussion forums and threads resulted in breadth rather than depth and less posting. The presenter recommended creating smaller groups and more focused threads.
The second presenter compared Moodle and Facebook and found that moodle is a teacher-driven, controlled, monitored, and assessed site where students do not feel free to communicate casually and interact with one another. On the other hand, Facebook is more engaging, easy to use, easy to navigate, facilitates immediate interactions, and is designated as the students' space. Navigation, accessibility, and interface are important to think about when selecting and evaluating tools for hosting online discussions.
And the final presenter shared how student facilitation of discussion forums improves the student's sense of belonging to the learner community, helps the student understand how to learn in the course, increases the student's credibility, and improves the student's connection and communication with classmates. Student facilitation involves providing guidance on reading and research, coming up with research questions, determining the focus, posing starter questions, making sure everyone participates, stimulating discussions, and synthesizing and summarizing the forum. This can be a great way to give students a more active role in the class.
Hi Torrey,
ReplyDeleteThey’ve been lulling you to sleep, huh? Unbelievable. You tell those fancy researchers—my buddy Zack said to keep me engaged.
Considering “students’ space” (in Facebook forums, for example) is an important concept, and I’m glad that you brought it up. It emphasizes the importance of teaching students on their home turf—what they feel most comfortable and confident in using. Bringing school to them. And that isn’t to suggest that teachers oughtn’t introduce new and unfamiliar courseware/software/technology to their students, but rather, that teachers would be wise to keep an open mind and “active” ear in considering what students’ already know and how they like learning.
Regarding your second paragraph, I was a wee-bit at odds on the “lurker” posting behavior. Though I don’t know the specific context of the research, I can attest to my personal blogging/posting habits in this course and within other courses via Gauchospace threads. Based on those experiences, I wouldn’t say that I necessarily understood a post better because I’ve visited it more than once—and I definitely don’t think that re-visiting posts made me any less likely to respond. There are a bunch of factors in there, namely: perceived quality, clarity, interest in the material, whether they’ve left an idea within the post “open” for debate, and sometimes, the nature of your relationship with the writer. And hey, I realize that I’m not the gold standard of research subjects or anything like that, but I’m willing to bet that other folks have had similar experiences. Yes? No? Maybe so? What do you think, Torrey? You’re 1,00000000x smarter than This Guy.
Z
Listening versus lurking is an interesting concept. For second language learners who may be just getting used to hearing the target language, it may be difficult to pay attention to specific details and demonstrate their listening ability (in listening comprehension tasks, for example)in a competent manner. The key here I think is for teachers to provide explicit rational and directions of the listening activity.
ReplyDeleteAs a writing tutor, I come across so many students who have no idea what their instructors want in their essays. I feel that it is our responsibility as teachers to make clear what our expectations are from our students.
Did you make it to Ghirardelli square? :)
DeleteThanks for sharing Torrey! I'm definitely familiar with the lull you to sleep presenters! Glad you found some interesting points though:). I'm curious about the student facilitation, that does sound good in terms of getting students more involved, but I'm not really sure how you would make that happen. Did you glean any more details, by chance? Was it in small group forums? Or whole class but rotating by day or week or something? I can't imagine that one student should be the facilitator always. It is definitely good when we can get the students to take more responsibility and be aware of what makes a "good" forum and how to keep that going!
ReplyDeleteI could see moodle and facebook definitely playing different roles in terms of classroom use given the contexts. However, when class facebook pages are set up I think they enter into a more limbo space, while it's a student-centered environment, it's not really organic per se and the students won't necessarily interact with it just because it's fb... I could see how it could become more like a moodle pretty quickly. I'm not sure how to inspire students to use a facebook page productively without it being too classroomy...
Go Heroes!
I agree with what you heard about Moodle versus Facebook. I don't know enough about Moodle, but I know that some colleagues of mine tried to get students interested in a website that mimicked Facebook for classroom use. The idea was that the teacher could control the content more and avoid any lawsuits. But the kids just didn't engage with it. Authenticity is important to students, and therefore, should be important to us as educators. Now that I'm not their teacher anymore, I am friends with many former students on Facebook, and they are immensely social on it. It is definitely in some ways an untapped resource, and the authenticity of it can't be recreated yet.
ReplyDelete