Tuesday, September 02, 2008

A bit of thinking on Learning Communities

For my online community college course, I discovered that once the course is going (with some required postings), the less I post, the more they do!

While this is a special case of "community" it is useful. It is a bit like asking questions in a F2F class or presentation - making yourself wait at least 30 seconds (which seems like an eternity to you) before concluding that there are no questions. Just when you are about to move on, the flood of really good thoughtful questions and discussion start.

On Sep 1, 3:03 pm, "Leigh Blackall" wrote:
.. I am quietly delighted that I have only contributed to 14% of the email
forum's discussion. In past courses, and in most online communities I am a
member of, I am way above the 50% line. The fact that I am able to take a
back seat so early in this course (in the email forum at least) is perhaps
evidence of a functional online community developing here.

The FOC08 course uses blogs as the main technology to support teaching and learning. If you count the all blog postings, the "score" is very different. This is amazing! Leigh, your delight is well deserved.

In another discussion, I asked John if there was a blog version of his information. To which he replied...
> Hi Valerie - you could usehttp://groups.google.co.uk/group/eportfolios-and-plts/browse_thread/t...

I could, but I won't.

Having all the activity submissions, reflecting, and conversations take place via blogging is an interesting facilitation and learning methodology. I think it is important to make every effort to follow the FOC08 program as defined by Leigh.

Online communities have used forums for 20 years. What's the learning experience in continuing with that?

No comments:

Post a Comment