Thoughts on the class and final project ideas

We’ve devoted the last several weeks to the (hopefully) collaborative investigation of a group of Web 2.0 related tools for collaboration and communication. We wanted to experiment with social networking tools and learn to locate specific audiences in order to critically experience and discuss the possibilities and limitations for personal use and within an educational setting.

Now whether we as individuals used these tools consistently or sporadically, we thought it important that through collective inquiry we would not only collaboratively explore but question the meaning and the organization of our thoughts over these past weeks. From speaking with most of you privately and in our live sessions we learned this has been a real challenge! We had hoped to use this blog as a collaborative ‘classroom’ space to discuss various questions posed from week to week, and to have you use your personal blogs to develop your final projects, spurred by the readings, sites given at the outset, and your visions for the potential of these tools. In not all cases did it seem clear to everyone where comments should be posted or what the differences were(even when we’d say reply here to the weekly classroom questions!). So organization of our content on the class blog was our clear challenge to explore for future classes.

In addition, as TC doesn’t offer a robust enough online learning/dissemination space, our use of tools was relegated to those in a commercial domain (Facebook for social networking has gone commercial, and Blogger is owned by Google, though Twitter for status updating is not for profit and there were many more possibilities for platforms discussed in our latest online session). School teachers face the same issues and more…some school districts entirely ban these tools from their networks which causes real barriers to those early adopters among you who want to teach using them. So a project which explores tools and barriers to their use would be a helpful project exploration.

In last week’s email, Howie sent invitations to try our site on Ning, and hopefully some of us will be able to contribute their thoughts on the differences, benefits and drawbacks. (This would be an appropriate project too by the way.)

We also thought it might be helpful that this part of our investigation and project follow through should give consideration to the initial questions posed in the syllabus based on the following premise; that a broadened spectrum of digital learning technologies brings along new possibilities for transnational education across cultural boundaries. Which of these tools holds the most promise to you? … this topic was the essential question with which to explore on your blog as a project foundation.

Social Networking and Communities of Inquiry

If social networking spaces such as facebook, Second Life, G-Chat, IM, Twitter, and YouTube, alongside handheld devices, cell phones, text messaging, email and voice mail -- have become an integral part of the lives of young people looking for new ways to engage in online digital sociability, we asked how education might tap into that collective and devoted this blog space as a community of inquiry to discuss this and other issues.

A community of inquiry depends on sustained communication and collaboration so that participants can share their insights- it is both a collaborative and iterative experience that prepares students for planned as well as unintended paths. Collaborative inquiry goes past simply accessing and incorporating information , and this concept seems a bit out of the comfort zone for many. One of the first articles by Prensky may have at the outset seemed to describe any number of us as digital natives. At the end of this class are you still in agreement with your initial opinion of where you fall in his continuum? Those of you who are interested in reconsidering might want to explore counter arguments to Prensky’s paper from David Buckingham in Children of the Technology Age? an article in the Electronic Journal of Communication (1998), Beyond Technology (2007) and Neil Selwin’s article Digital Native, Myth and Reality: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9775892/Digital-Native for your final project.

According to Dewey, educational inquiry is an iterative process of investigating problems and issues, not just memorizing solutions. Inquiry focuses on intended goals and outcomes that are self guided, self directed and task based. Our task at hand for the project asked us to:

1- Define the question(s) posed in the original syllabus as they pertain to your own experiences with Web 2.0 and social networking tools.
2- Search for relevant information and use the tools as an experiential base
3- Formulate new solutions, assimilate the uses you see modeled elsewhere
4- Apply those solutions as appropriate to a lesson plan or concept for using the tools
5- Reflect on solutions through discourse here and on your blogs

We also began and will end with the following quote from educational philosopher Maxine Greene:
“Passions, then engagements, and imagining. I want to find a way of speaking of community, an expanding community that will take shape as people speaking as who, not what they are, come together in speech and action, as Arendt puts it, to constitute something in common among themselves.” (Maxine Greene as quoted in Baldacchino, 2008)

As Greene’s notion of community implies taking the risk of imagination it was hoped that this class would be that imaginative space for inquiry and for sharing your ideas. What were the successes or challenges for you?

Referenced information on collaborative inquiry from: Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines
D. Randy Garrison, Norman D. Vaughan