Martin is a ninja! And I don't get Kolb – here's why

[imogenbertin]

Well I’m going to start with the important bit again. Martin Hawksey has done a fantastic job in providing the technology for my best MOOC experience so far (no. 4 attempt at a MOOC) and he s clearly a total ninja at learning technology of all descriptions. Kudos to Martin and the OcTEL team!
Mailpress: the newsletter works! I wish it looked a bit prettier but it keeps me checking on other people’s posts, getting ideas and being prepared to contribute myself. The links to other’s posts are absolutely key and stop it from being yet more dross I have to filter from my email.

 

BBForum: Martin’s made it as good as it can be. It is a bit [horribly] clunky but we’re using it… and I think a common space for week to week course contributions is important. I would love to know what’s been going on in the Southampton forum but I don’t have time to trek over there.
Course reader: I think this is good but a bit like I don’t use twitter that much because I don’t have time for all the filtering, I find it a bit overwhelming, so I haven’t used it that much. But I think it’s a great resource.
Google analytics: please could Martin do some more blog posts or other information on how he’s set this up and what is being measured? He didn’t get time to mention Intercom CRM – more on this please!
Very interested to hear that Canvas has a good API. Of the MOOC platforms I’ve used (Coursera, Coursesites, Canvas, WordPress), Canvas also had the nicest visual interface which I think is important.
I thought Phil Tubman’s point about whether you should start from a “safe” VLE was important. I did this with a course last year where we did the first semester teaching “building block” skills from Blackboard, then the second with students creating WordPress portfolios and recording a variety of other activities. To be honest I’d just leave out the VLE entirely if I could another time because most VLEs are just extra technology stress for learners and their interfaces are so poor compared to the social networks that learners judge them by.
Oh, and an interesting statistic on #edcmooc from Martin’s talk – only 900 blog contributions out of 37,000 registrations? I wonder if one of the long term metrics for MOOCs will be learner contributions that evidence of higher order activities in Bloom’s taxonomy e.g.

Applying – Analysing – Evaluating – Creating.

Rather than watching a few videos and giving up. [Guilty as charged…]
Now the boring bits…
I’ve always found the Kolb cycle as applied to learning development easy to explain and useful with learners, but Kolb’s basic theory leaves me cold. So I get this bit:
Experience – Reflection – Conceptualise – Test
But I don’t get the core of Kolb i.e. grasping experience (doing/watching) v transforming experience (feeling/thinking). He says you can’t do both at once so you have to decide which – that there is a dialectic conflict between them. I absolutely see that different people learn in different ways at different times and so multiple affordances of content, pedagogy and technology are important (but also confusing to guide learners to understand they don’t have to try all the affordances all of the time).

 

It’s a gut feeling – I cannot claim to have had any time to review the experimental evidence and it’s something I’d like to do. I’m just not sure about Kolb’s learning styles. It does not chime with how I feel when I learn. How is watching “grasping”, unless it is  David Hume’s “impressions”, i.e. acquisition of experiences through the senses as a largely passive activity? Yet I learn by actively matching the new information against what I already have and looking for congruence and conflict and trying to figure out an explanation which allows the new information to become congruent, with a focus on how you might experiment to show cause and effect.

The feeling of this process is both satisfying and frustrating at the same time and if I cannot resolve conflict I want to search for extra information until there is some sort of way to weave it together.  But I’m quite happy to put opposing bits of knowledge “on hold” until such time as I may find a way to reconcile them. So I’m an assimilator in Kolb terms. But I do it in a lot of different ways and practical demonstration and experience would be a big part of how I teach and learn.

Mixing Honey and Mumford in gives this Imo-embellished shorthand of the four types:

Activist = Accommodating = do and feel. Open minded, gregarious, immediate experience, not detail/implementation. Have the experience.
Reflector = Diverging = feel and watch. Gather data, delay conclusions, listen first, thoughtful. Review the experience.
Theorist = Assimilating = watch and think. Conclude from experience, assimilate disparate facts into coherent theories, reject subjectivity/flippancy.
Pragmatist = Converging = do and think. Try out new ideas, problem solving, make decisions quickly, bored with long discussions.

I enjoyed Hill et al which I think comes down to the Apple/Ikea debate (both companies “show people the way” rather than analysing customer needs and responding to them. Are you teaching by focus group, or are you saying “we have here a product/idea/piece of knowledge which is so much better than anything that went before that it WILL be adopted because it really enhances learning/business/whatever human activity”? Probably something of a compromise between the two… In activity 1.2 it was emergent learning that seemed to best fit with the part of my practice that I think works.
Considerations in my practice: technology available, participant expertise, participant’s expressed learning interests. I try to get across some fundamental concepts and to use different methods that may help different people stay interested (why do we all have to use the word “engage” these days?). My learners are usually working full or part-time, then doing classes. Keeping them awake can be a serious issue! I need to drag certain people and certain complex concepts together and I often can’t predict what will result. The most important part for them is often the social interaction – so how do I keep that going in a blended environment?

For example creating short videos – they hate it and they love it…! They do it in face to face class because of the reassurance of the small group which gets them over the shyness barrier. Then they discover they have really learned something by producing even a tiny 2-minute clip which gives them the interest to try some other, slightly harder bits of content generation.
Lack of time of learners: major elephant in the room.
So while I really enjoyed Graham’s explanation of Google Apps, I actually tend to use more basic tools like Wallwisher and Polleverywhere. My activity from his presentation would be along the lines of: a google form for results of a distributed group activity with a spreadsheet result with a chart available on the web in Google Sites to interpret the results. Showing how pooled knowledge can improve on individual and it can be easy and asynchronous. I like “show summary of responses”! Hadn’t spotted that before.
In practice I’ve found Google Apps a mistake when I tried to use it for booking tutorials. Half the students couldn’t use the link because they don’t have Google accounts and despite instructions as to how to set one up if you don’t have a gmail email, they couldn’t figure it out. Others couldn’t understand how to save their selections because it wasn’t Excel. So I ended up doing the usual compilation from their emails, an admin time waste of a high order. If your students are not very digi-literate then you need to be careful or using Google Apps can actually knock their confidence. Google Apps exercises have to be properly piloted.
Kolb development cycle: I think I need to go on a Google Apps course to be sure it’s not me that’s the problem… And I need to learn Google Hangouts to try to develop better alternative social grouping to convert my courses to online.

[imogenbertin]

Actually, I’m going to winge about BBForum. Each post I have to spend about 5-10 minutes sorting out line break issues. Often I can’t because it won’t let me edit them. Bullet points don’t work. Grrrr! Pain in the ass… Can’t post pictures… 🙁

[philtubman]

=I did this with a course last year where we did the first semester teaching “building block” skills from Blackboard, then the second with students creating WordPress portfolios and recording a variety of other activities. To be honest I’d just leave out the VLE entirely if I could another time because most VLEs are just extra technology stress for learners and their interfaces are so poor compared to the social networks that learners judge them by.

LTI Bb and WordPress together for a seamless transition from one to the other… no double logon…

http://www.imsglobal.org/toolsinteroperability2.cfm

[GraphDesProject]

Imogen and Phil,

I quite like the idea of a VLE. We use Moodle with our f2f learners but it is totally one way – from us to them; they cannot upload anything to it so it’s just a “headquarters” for info and resources. They do all their input in WordPress (mainly) blogs or even is sketchbooks by hand. They strat to use Moodle and WordPress as soon as they get on the course (in fact, some of them start beforehand as we advise interviewess to set up a WP if they haven’t already got one and to rehearse what can be done with it).

However, with my online learners, who are all asynchronous, I as yet have no equivalent of a VLE. They don’t need it for course material and resources as that is all in a PDF. But they could do with a place for extra ad hoc info/news and indeed a place to meet up and discuss FAQ type issues. I’ve tried MyStudy Cloud which seemed great but – as you know – I have had endless troubles using it, so it doesn’t seem as user-friendly as it ought to be.

So I wouldn’t leave out a VLE; just keep it simple and useful. And yes, para breaks have driven me mad!!!

Sancha

[philtubman]

@Sancha – have you thought of doing something in a G+ community rather than a VLE? I have recently started to think that this provides lots of ‘social’ VLE activities (and a synchronous ‘hangout’ if required…)

(it will aggregate you WP blogs and provide a space for structured social interaction – look at the ocTEL one if you haven’t already…)

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