Today there were 2 members who did not discuss the paper (Stian and Jennifer)
About the reading group compared to last year's CSCL course
- Last year Stian really wanted students in the CSCL course to just take initiative and organize things, and invite people
- Instead students would sometimes try to convince the whole class to agree on something, which led to a lot of discussion, but was not so productive
- An interesting idea would be to invite some of the students from that course to go back, one year later, and do an "archaeological after-action review" (maybe with Joe Corneli), and look at how things played out using different learning theories, the social interaction etc. Could be an interesting collaborative research project.
- This was part of his motivation for just inviting to a synchronous chat session this time, as an experiment, even if he wasn't the course organizer or hadn't "asked anyone's permission" (of course students don't have to, but we need to model that)
- Jennifer thought the synchronous sessions last year were really great, and made us into a community - important because outside of the chats, the course felt a bit "disconnected". (Althoug the bi-weekly newsletters really helped - something similar, perhaps weekly, could be useful in this reading group).
- Stian has a bunch of ideas of things we could try to do in the chats, such as collaboratively creating an artefact (like this chat summary which Stian and Jennifer are creating live during the one hour meeting), trying out different online collaboration tools, splitting into small-group discussions etc, not just "discussing" without structure in a big group
- One of the advantages of the CSCL course was that the readings had already been selected after a lot of work by the organizers, and so were all of quite high quality, and also built on each other to a certain degree. But of course, this also meant that it was a lot of work to put together the course, as opposed to just coming up with an idea for a reading circle, and having it "happen" almost immediately.
- There is a value, though, in having a group of people who have gone through a number of papers together, and especially if these papers somehow build or relate to each other - you build a shared context, which presumably makes subsequent discussions much richer and more meaningful. It will be interesting to see to what extent that can happen in this reading circle.
- There could also be different ways of structuring how we choose papers, for example asking each person who joins to suggest a paper that they "stand behind", and which they can introduce to the group etc. Stian talked about John's proposal to have an automatic TEDx group, where everyone joining suggests one video, and after ten people joins, a new course is automatically created - the system will randomly select one video per week to be discussed. Something similar could be used for a reading circle.
- We discussed motivation in online groups and how the number of tasks should be kept low so that people don't get overwhelmed by too much structure and too many activities (summary of week's interactions and main points, blog posts, online chats, all time consuming)
- We discussed the need for cohesion of papers leading to depth of exploration of ideas, but also the need for very different papers which would shake us up a bit
- Vygotsky book club is on the back burner for future use - but it's a neat idea to have courses built on books, because you can read one chapter per week - no challenge in choosing what to read, and you are (hopefully) guaranteed internal consistency, you can dig really deep into the material etc
- Vision of "long tail of reading groups" - if we had 10s of thousands of learners at P2PU, ideally we'd be able to find 5-10 people who were really interested (and had time) for almost any topic we could think of
- It would be useful for all of us if our readings in here relate to our own research, possibly our lit reviews (some of us are in the process of reading piles of papers for our dissertation, would be nice to discuss relevant ones in our Researchers Homestead group)
- We briefly discussed the need for more support for flextime students, especially long distance flextime students like me
- Stian mentioned the lack of rigorous articles on online learning, I suggested he read around the topic and get into research done on groups "there is a lot of research on groups esp recently in organizations, how groups work together online and f2f... even things like cooperative learning, how we learn from each other, experiments done on how goals are best achieved by groups, what tactics work best, such acting in your own selfish interests or acting for the group, which is better [I like Axelrod's Prisoner's Dilemma]
(I'm just copying and pasting for now, will clean up later. if you want you can start with the stuff we wrote in the main text view, I'm going through the chat on the right)
Looks good, do you want to have a quick look at what I wrote above?
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- actually the whole class agreed on something in less than a minute I think, it was suggested in a chat and most of us agreed. The time-taking thing was getting one of the organizers to agree to what we had agreed to in the chat. That did not happen. The groups idea was annulled. This was a major problem for one memeber of the group, who thought that a grop decision had some validity.
- I guess part of it is that the organizer shouldn't have to agree... People could just go ahead and do it anyway. Everyone saw you as the boss. We would have to overrule what you thought in order to do it "our way"
- I know, adn that's part of the problem! :) but it's complex... I think there were a few factors - one is that I missed a few weeks because of travel, eye infection etc, whihc made it more complicated... On one hand Monica and I had spent a lot of time designing the course and we of course believed that that design had some vlaue. On the other hand, when people were endlessly discussing "what kind of OER they should create' for example - it would have been better if they just went ahead and created some OER and invited others rather than get everyone to agree (I wasn't so interested in the manifesto fo rexample, but I never tried to stop it - I was very happy that it actually _happened_ - I jut didn't want to be forced to join... anyway. Let's move this out of the "summary section" :) agreedYou can modify my initial sentence which you didn't gree with if you want.
- well if it was the oer thing you were referring to and not the group vs stian thing
- ( moved it below)
- I seriously can't even remember all the details anymore. And I am not saying anybody were right or wrong. But to me it was a really interesting insight that so much time could be spent on "meta-issues" (which I think is a fact we can agree on), and that in future courses it's worth thinking about how we can enable students to spend their time productively - and have lot' sof initiative and autonomy, but without spending all the course time on that...
- We taled too much about making an OER and it ate up a lot of time, some of us didn't post in our blogs but just did a lot of blah blah about the resource, which never got made. Waste of time.
(totally) I've moved all of the other stuff below. I'll move this too
Joe Corneli talked about doing an "after action review" of the course which we never did, it would actually be kind of fun to go back - the course is still there as far as I know, we could all go back as an action research project and research ourselves one year ago :) Could be an interesting paper :))))
This Pad is a placeholder for a synchronous meetup for the P2PU reading group on peer-learning (https://p2pu.org/en/groups/the-researchers-abode/content/completely-online-group-formation-paper-discussion/) on Saturday, April 25 2012 at 5PM EST (around the world: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Live+event&iso=20120428T17&p1=250&ah=1)
This week's paper: April 20-27th: Goggins, Laffey & Gallagher. Completely online group formation and development: small groups as socio-technical systems. Information Technology and People, 2011. [Jessy]
we can also type here :)
ok
weekly summary was very good when you and Mon did it
yeah but then you need someone to do it :) it's funny how we take something very simple and low-overhead, like a reading circle, and gradually add features that make it more like a "course" - we would like people to show up for the weekly syncronous chat, we would like someone to send out a weekly summary, we would like some high quality papers that build on each other ... that's getting quite close to the design of the CSCL course :)
oh so it becomes too much work
not necessarily, I just think it's fascinating. but I do think there is a value to having a group of people who consistently engage with material, and for that material to have some sort of internal consistency - because I suspect having more shared context can make the discussions much more meaningful... it willl be interesting during future weeks to what extent participants stay the same, and to what extent there is a shared context and people can refer back to previous articles etc
i think we need shared context but we also need radically different papers to make us think
we should not get too comfortable
that is true, however sometimes I feel like every course at OISE is like that - survey courses, let's jump around... what I would love is to really dig deep... to do an eight week course on Vygotsky, or a six-week course on Knowledge Building, or whatever... read a bunch of papers from different angles and really struggle to understand something deeply. something you don't get to do very often otherwise. (you can do it by yourself of course, but there won't be a course at OISE all about Vygotsky etc)
that sounds great!
the only prob;em is making sure the topics are engaging everyone
some people might not get too excited by Vygotsky
well that depends on the definition of "everyone" -- I'm not saying a certain topic would engage everyone who are currently signed up for the reading circle, but given that our initial idea was "long tail of courses" theoretically in the whole world, you should be able to find 5-10 people deeply interested in just about anything :)
long tail of courses? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail
and there's the problem of finding those 5-10 people, and whether or not they have time etc.
well let's define it as 5-10 people both deeply interest and with time :) and of course ideally P2PU would be the place you find those people, because P2PU has tens of thousands of people and hundreds of reading groups. we're obviously still far from there! :)
tens of thousands wow great stian
you gotta aim for the sky :)
ok let's do it
!
ok I am up for an indepth look at a few different ideas
what happened to your Vygotsky book club idea?
it's all ready to go I just never launched it :) I even uploaded the book here in a format where we can comment on each paragraph http://vygotsky.reganmian.net/
ok realistically speaking I can only do one extra thing on the side, and right now it's this group
but I'd be up for Vygotsky anothet time
yeah, me and Rebecca were talking about trying to launch this later this summer, maybe once the book group got going more.
cool
(and of course, part of it might be for us two to find things that don't count as "on the side" - ideally I should spend eight hours a day reading articles and taking notes to prepare for my comps/lit review anyway... so if I can target it properly, the course would actually help me do my PhD more effectively, rather than be "another burden"...)
yes I know what you mean
i have a LOT of reading to do
but this group is a great idea
who knows how many ideas might be sparked by something that we read/discuss in here
honestly I am surprised that OISE doesn't have online groups as a normal part of the learning process
it is such a great idea
esp for Ph.D. students
yeah, I wonder if Clare Brett was trying to do something like that, get graduate students blogging etc.
I don't know, her meetings were always at bad times for me
I don't know much about what she tried to do
she was very focused on flex-time students and giving them the feeling of being graduate students - how can you replicate all that stuff that happens "in-between classes", the mentoring, research projects, chatter in the hallways etc
I don't think it can be replicated
but there can be some reasonable substitutions
right, anyway we have tons of people doing flex-time, and there will probably just become more, since OISE doesn't have to give them funding :) so it's not a choice of "whether" it's more how do we make the best out of it
haha I'm flextime and there is not much of a sense of belonging to OISE at all
you're a bit of an extreme case :) most flextimers live in the area and are working full-time so they can at least come in for seminars in the weekends, some socials etc. but i am sure there will be more people like you in the future as well.
yes but in the meantime it's been a very weird Ph.D
and MA
There needs to be a LOT more structure for flextime students
more social possibilities
the thing is, even for me, during the whole week I sit in my office without a window and barely see anyone... and then we have the lab meetings on Fridays, but since my research is so completely different from others in my lab (they're doing science in primary school in physical tech-enhanced classrooms), there aren't many to talk to about my research - so most of the people I collaborate with are all online and scattered around...
ha I imagined you were always in meetings and doing things f2f with various groups
you're so socially oriented
hard to imagine you all alone most of the time
:) yeah I am involved in some stuff at OISE, like pushing for Open Access etc, but in terms of my research, there really aren't anyone else doing much related stuff. Bodong and Monica who work with Marlene are probably the closest ones, we meet up once in a while
so I guess this online group is good for you too then
if you are usually in your office all the time
for sure:)
for me too
last year I learned so much from the cscl group
I usually pick and go (rugby) with ideas I pick up from articles, discussions
it's a great source of new and very useful ideas
good for future research ideas
absolutely. and i was inspired to think a lot about different issues that emerge in open courses that might not be present in non-open online courses, etc. i wrote quite a bit about it. but it's difficult to connect it to the traditional CSCL literature, not many people looking at it there.
well it's a good opening for you then
true but I also need to connect to the top CSCL literature to show that I'm serious and rigorous etc. can't just write a paper citing Downes and Wiley...
hahaha
and having read almost every paper ever written about an open online course (seriously - part of my lit review) i can tell you that there is very little of what I would call "high quality" or "rigorous" research done, lot' sof ideas, some case studies, some descriptive stuff, but nothing really deep... i guess we're just starting out. and a lot of papers tend to be written by grad students, etc
interesting...
we are pioneers...
in the wild west
(yeah but sometimes that means we think that there is no need to really review the literature, and thus we get "history-less" research :))
you can read around online classes
there is a lot of research on groups
esp recently in organizations, how groups work together online and f2f
i know, although to be honest with you I find a lot of the research on traditional distance learning to be very poor as well. but yeah, I think what you just mentioned is a fruitful field though.
even things like cooperative learning, how we learn from each other, experiments done on how goals are best achieved by groups
, what tactics work best, such acting in your own selfish interests or acting for the group, which is better
one of my biggest challenges is coming up with ways of analyzing learning... or success - how do you define success in an online course?
whew that is a big question
for me it hso much to do with the social aspect of learning, but you also have to feel like you have really learned something
I'd say its successful when you've buuilt a commh¥unity you feel good about and you have learned a lot from them
one interesting thing abot our paper for this week
how do you operationalize "learned a lot from them"? :)
survey and interviews and analysis of transripts to see what "new knowledge" evolved
yeah. i am especially interested in content analysis. i need to read up more about methods of doing that. I think there is some useful stuff in the knowledge building literature. one of my next plans after finishing my lit review of open courses is to look really indepth at the literature on knowledge building.
i did a bit of it in my linguistics days... discourse analysis
very time consuming
interesting overall but takes soooo much time
KB is very cool, may possibilities there
yeah that's the scary part!
hey, we have about 15 minutes left (I know we could just keep going, but I've got a bunch of stuff to do). I wonder if a productive use of our time would be to go through what we've said so far and organize a quick little overview which we could post back into the reading group? (that would be useful for our future selves too). I don't think anyone really wants to read the entire transcript :)?
sure
shall we make some bullet points?
yeah we can just start at the top of this page to put some point,s we can copy and paste text too and gradually clean it up.
ok