Now I know what it feels like to fall behind. I had to go to Washington on Wednesday and didn't have time to read all the final posts on Tuesday or the blogs for last week, then had three days of intense conference with only a chance to do basic email, was held over an extra night by the snow--and now I'm SO far behind reading everything. I expect to catch up Sunday, but still, it's definitely bad news to fall behind.
The TPI discussion was interesting, with lots of good posts about what I think is not probably a very good instrument. It is also interesting that there is much more continuing reference to buzz words than there ever was in my f2f class, I think because the visits to the websites are more frequent.
I am wondering if the Moodle discussion forum is any better than the Blackboard forum. It does not seem a good format for encouraging deeper threads because you don't see the responses easily--it takes work to go through them all. On the other hand, it makes the initial posts much clearer than in Blackboard, where the levels get mixed up. It also may be the format of the questions and my prompt--when they are big, you get everyone posting but when they are narrower, you get more of a discussion. I also like having the posts come into my email box so I know what's going on but find I have to log onto Moodle for the context if they are not initial posts.
I am also trying to figure out if the two groups works better than one group.
Two ideas came up this week that I need to think about. One was that it would be nice if the students could teach a week of the class. It reminded me that in one of the IB classes, the students manage a topical discussion forum, with a different student posting the discussion question each week. The discussion question do not necessarily relate to the subject of the week, just to the overall topic. That might work.
The other thread through many of the posts was about communication. There were calls for more video (i.e., lectures), which might work for the very first introduction but which I wouldn't want to use at other times since I am philosophically opposed to lecturing. But what about using Facebook? I wonder what that would be like and how it would add to the class.
Another great idea: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php for looking back at older versions of a school's website. Will definitely integrate that next time.
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I love the idea that moodle posts come to my e-mail and since my e-mail is synced to my phone I get constant updates about the discussion posts on the go. I think I like this because it is actually the same reason I constantly update my facebook as well. As you probably know, I would love to see facebook used in an academic setting, but I don't know if that is the class consensus. Possibly because I've been using facebook since it came out, I have a bias.
ReplyDeleteI had the experience in another online class where each student was responsible for one week of the course where we did extra readings and posed questions to the rest of the class, and then responded to the answers based on the readings. It was a lot of extra work but an interesting model.
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