10.26.2005

Collaborate

I recently started working on a collaborative project with my brothers. We all live in different states: IA, CO, GA, WI, and OR. Communication has been initially email, but soon we will move toward Skype for more immediate discussion.

Already, in the course of the emails, we have chosen the roles we are willing to assume to potentially bring the project to life.

I never had much luck with group projects as a student. As an instructor, I used them all the time. I found them to be exhausting, but fruitful when I managed them well. I also found most students reacted with grunts and whines when I announced a group activity. With my brothers, I seem to have loads of fun working as a group. So what gives?!

The participants comfort with strangers is an obvious place to start. Our learners are likely not very familiar with each other and when you ask them to do even the simplest tasks together there are nervous feelings to overcome. There is pressure to appear intelligent and cool.

As the instructor you can model interactive behavior. Help your students appear intelligent and cool. Try responding to simple questions with more questions and "Your question got me thinking..." Try incorporating more collaboration with special attention to the roles each student will play and their ability to comfortably share in the process.

10.20.2005

Diff Persp

Diff. Persp.

I used to be a foreign language instructor. I taught Chinese. It was relatively common to encounter students who did not practice good language learning skills. All sorts of reasons and conditions exist to explain this (not the least of which is there seems to be a horrible misconception that Chinese is impossibly hard to learn). At times, however, I found myself lost when good and great students failed to comprehend seemingly simple concepts. To gain some perspective, I signed up for Banjo lessons.

Maybe you will disagree, but I did find many interesting similarities between language and banjo study. Constant and consistent practice was one. And interaction was another. You can learn more from playing with people in an hour than you can in a week locked alone in your room.

That’s the background story. Now, while I am rusty both in Chinese and banjo picking, I am gaining skills in design and interactivity. To further my knowledge I recently signed up to experience an online course for myself. Already, the student perspective is illuminating. Being in a position where I am expected to learn material online with a group of online people all organized by an online person has provided some insights.

  1. Discussions are connective. I really do feel a part of a group, and this is just the first week. Maybe I am lucky and have a communicative core, but the instructor does an incredible job at pointing to other posts to answer student questions. He also gives time for students to help other students. He encourages this and praises those who help.

  2. What’s next is so obvious. There is no question about what needs to be done and when. Repetition of instruction is not intrusive. Or maybe I like it since the repetition is usually designed with a “remember:” It’s just one word, but it allows me to skip the section if I do in fact already remember.

  3. Discussions are casual. I thought I might have some issues here. The instructor described the discussion area rather rigidly, but he was quick to praise humor. And he is familiar and not afraid or too cautious to use emoticons or SMS abbreviated text (lol, omg…)

I cannot recommend enough the idea of revisiting an old perspective: learning. You might just learn something.

10.13.2005

My Learning Style



From http://www.learning-styles-online.com/

Looks like I need to work on my Social learning skills. This online quiz is free to use and even has an option available to registered instructors to create Groups. You can then send your students to submit their answers to the quiz in order to gather some class specific learning style stats. Pretty slick. Wouldn't it be nice to know that the vast majority of learns in your English Comp class were low verbal, but highly physical and social?

Now I wouldn't advocate catering to their every learning style. As if that would ever be possible anyway. But if I was in your class struggling with a group assignment perhaps a quick glance at my results would cause an instructor to say, "Hey, Al. How are you getting along in your group? Are you finding you have tasks as a member of the group? Do you feel like the group is helping you? Do you have some pictures you might share with the group to further the assignment?"

That might be great. That kind of push -- touching upon my strengths to bolster my weakness -- would make learning very productive.