You’re Doing it Wrong: Design, Learning, Pedagogy and the Spaces Between
I love how #rhizo15
tends to take over my thought process and that I am finding connections to our
discussions in many different spaces. One of my best friends is a high school
teacher who teaches for a Catholic school board. One of the prerequisites to
her employment is for her to take an “online” course which touches on Catholic tenets.
This course runs 12 weeks every Saturday from 8-5pm. Yes, you heard me, an
online course with set times. Not only that but they require audio and visual
so students need to have a webcam. I believe this is the ultimate case of pedagogues
not understanding pedagogy. Online courses by design should be asynchronous and
they should not mandate visual connection to other participants at all times.
This is a failure of design, and the proof is in the participants. Within two
or three hours of the course participants (including my friend) were already
checked out. What this course is tantamount to is recording lectures and
forcing people to watch them at certain times. This is not online learning,
this is in-class learning put online and there is a very big difference!
This definitely is in contrast to the wonderful things that
I have seen and discussed in #rhizo15 over the past 5 days. I have participated
in an online learning recipe (maybe the course designers should read that
recipe actually), seen creative use of visuals and audio (oh @NomadWarMachine
and her dulcet ukulele vibe), and interacted with theory and texts to explore
the bigger issues surrounding design in a course without design.
As far as my learning subjective goes I feel I very much on
track. I have met some great new people and the word fractal has been used 3
times more than normally would be in my circle (i.e. usually just by me). One of the things that came up yesterday was
how “key competencies“(@hammel_rachel) work in a course without design. I am a big
believer and advocate of types of literacies. What #rhizo15 does well is push
the limits of information literacy. You cannot possibly interact with all the people
and all the ideas so you need to use curatorial skills to gather what is of
interest to you, what makes you think outside your box, what is “value added”
to your own research?
Through discussions this week and my own research interests,
I would really like to study the sensory (specifically the tactile) in
#rhizo15, be that through the use of tactile terminology, or the tactility of
visuals as opposed to text. This is something I am still working on in terms of
process and I hope to have it sorted out next week (or by the end of #rhizo15-
which is never).
It has been such a great experience so far, full of ideas,
full of nuance. Let’s keep forking!
curious about tactile in #rhizo15, will follow you
ReplyDeleteThank you, Jaap! I think the sensory angle is an interesting one. I hope I can curate the related information in all of #rhizo15!
DeleteYes, and... One of the online courses I had in library school made great use of a few synchronous online sessions in a mostly asynchronous class. The course used a wide range of modalities: short recorded video lectures, articles and books, an assignment to report on observing and interviewing teens about library and media use. The synchronous sessions involved the whole class preparing complementary presentations. For one, we worked in small groups to summarize different genres within YA books and media. For the other two, the whole class read the same book, and we were each assigned a question to present on for 2-3 minutes, alone or in pairs. For each of these synchronous sessions, we knew how much work had gone into the presentations and were eager to hear from each other, as well as keyed up for our own parts. Very effective use of online conferencing tools, to do something that would not have been as engaging in any other medium.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting concept, taking the synchronous approach to presentations in an online class. Sometimes that mixed media aspect is what adds to the engagement. Thank you for sharing your experience!
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