I found this really interesting, and I’m going to attempt to transfer some of my hand written notes into my blog so that I can refer back to them in an easier way. One reason why I liked the session was the way it was presented eg as research finding. She stated the context, the questions, related worked, and what they had been doing.
Some of Salmon’s reasons for developing e-activities where.
- e-activates are cheap and easy
- teachers don’t need any much support (eg no need for designers and developers)
- text based
- learner is engaged
One of the key areas she talked about the problems of time, both for teachers and students . While students would like a full flexible system, this just is really not possible and often doesn’t help students actual complete the course. But pacing is important as well. Long courses need times when people can catch up. Salmon suggested about 30 activities over 5 weeks could work, and about 6 activities at time. With f2f students her suggestion was that 1 e-activity a week should be enough. The ratio of students to teachers they used is 15:1 and the teacher shouldn’t be working with more than two groups at a time.
The important thing is that time should be structured.
Other important factors are the building of community and Autotelism. Autotelism is a new term for me. It’s partly about study of happiness and the concepts Salmon saw as being important to e-moderating are:
1) Turning threats into challenges
2) Create focus, by short terms goals
3) Close attention to the group they are working with
4) Vision of group success, eg why are we doing this
One note I made at this stage that is interesting, their course only have around 2 minutes of reading before a student needs to act and communicate.
Hmm one thought I had at this stage was that I could transfer some of the practise of e-activities into my design students blogs tasks.
Features of a good e-activity are
1) Illustrative title.
2) There is a spark (a challenge or something that simulates).
3) There is a request for individual action.
4) Then there is some group discussions.
5) There is an elapsed time to do it, eg one week
6) Then the teacher summarises the discussions after the elapsed time
Types of Sparks
1) No more than at a4 attachment.
2) Visual/video/audio.
3) Knowledge footprint eg past posts.
I could see visual sparks working extremely well with my students.
The examples that where shown often had the sparks etc separate from the discussions. And the different parts of the message are color coded.
Student self evaluation should be part of the process, Salmon later talked how most the courses she has been involved in the assessment task have been keep separate from the discussions.
Here is my summary of the three stage model:
1) Motivation and participation, and overcoming technical and other barriers
2) Socialisation
3) Info Market – the stage where people are sharing information. But no real learning is happening at this stage. TIME starts to be because a issues at this stage
4) Knowledge construction
5) Meta Cognitive – eg students knowing how they are learning. At this stage students might be directed to web resources outside of the course
One of the key ideas I got from this videoconference was the idea of using metaphors as method of getting students to talk about group work. Because most people will not talk about how a group is going, but they might talk about a metaphor for the group.
I can see how many ideas Salmon is talking about are workng the online facilitations course that I’m doing at the moment. In terms of apply this to my teaching. I could convert all those written questions I’ve been asking the students to do into e-activities, the blogs tasks could become more like e-activities. I would if I could start doing some these things with my current groups of students ? maybe I try when I start the next project.