Course Feedback

Dear webloggers,

The six weeks have flown by and the beginning of the course is just a blurrrrrrrrr.

When I read Aaron and Bee's proposal to continue the community of practice, I started to think back at the whole experience. In other words, I asked myself what I had gotten out of the course.

Benefits of the Course

Here are some highlights:

• Participated in my first weblogging community
• Created my own reflective blog - a first
• Learned some new asynchronous tools, such as Blogger, Bloglines, Furl, etc
• Learned some new synchronous tools, e.g. Tapped In, Alado and Learning Times
• Read lots of useful online journals that explained some blogging tools
• Read some insightful journals describing some issues being debated in the blogging community
• Attended some exciting synchronous lectures and lively discussions with experts in blogging from around the world
• Met some interesting peers online who were supportive and informative
• Experienced the highs and lows of learning in a new virtual environment
• Re-experienced what it is like to be a student while juggling teaching, social and family obligations

As you can see, I've gotten a lot out of this course. In essence, I am extremely grateful to been given the opportunity to develop professionally in a supportive learning environment.

Challenges of the Course

Some bloggers and the moderators might also be interested in obtaining some feedback on the challenges I faced. Frankly, there were only two:

• Learning some new tools based on text-based instructions. Have you ever successfully understood how to do things by reading manuals? For example, how to set up your VCR to record from the instruction manual. It is murder and these are written by professional writers! It is always easier to watch someone demonstrate a new tool. That is why I loved the synchronous meetings where some guest speakers demonstrated the tools by projecting the webpages in Alado and Learning Times.
• Managing my time to accommodate my work, family and social obligations. I mean I had to change my life to cope with the extra workload. I can't understand how some of my peers were able to follow more than one Eve online course.

I hope you find this feedback useful.

End of the formal course ... beginning of a journey

I was going to begin experiment blogging with students before the course began. Now I feel more confident to venture down this path. More importantly, I have been reminded of the steep learning curve students experience with new technology.

What are my short-term and long-term goals?

• Create a blogging community of practice with my adult EFL students so that they may focus on their writing skills and learn some digital literacy skills
• Collaborate with my online peers e.g. invite some as guest speakers to the community blog
• Collaborate with some other schools from around the world so that my students may have the opportunity to interact with their peers in English

Thanks ... thank you all

I just wanted to thank the organizers, moderators and peers for their relentless hard work and good humor. In In particular, thanks to Bee and Aaron for sharing their expertise.

The journey has just begun ....

Azzam

PS I can now get back to scuba diving :)

still alive but lurking

Dear webloggers,

I'm listening to some chill out music at Totally Radio, based out of the UK, clicking away at the terminal. I haven't written anything on this blog for what seems like aaaages. I miss it!

Well, you can see that I haven't dropped off from the face of the earth nor have I lost interest in blogging. I caught the flue and had the luxury of escaping into a novel: Tokyo by Mo Hayder, which is a thriller about two people seeking answers to the Nanking massacres in China in WWII.

I don't think I'll try to catch up this week. Instead, I'll this week's assignment. See you later bloggers!

Baaaaaaabble ............ Babbbbbbbbbbble .......... BabbLLLLLLLLLE

RSS and Aggregation for Community Building

This posting is part of the collective task for group 2, in the week 3 collective task.

How could RRS and Aggregator assist community building online?

Being a neophyte to blogging, I'd like to mention an obvious application: encourage interaction by allowing participants to get to know each other. I view the Aggregator as a manager of blogs. This allows the user to quickly read the blogs of other members in the virtual class and permits one to comment. For example, a participant writes in her own blog. Then she reads the blogs of her virtual classmates and provides a positive comment through the aggregator.

The tool, however, only provides the opportunity for interaction. It is the tasks that actually prompt the students to interact. Here are some examples of tasks:

• Write about a passionate hobby or interest
• Write about favorite scene in a recent film
• Post your holiday picture and write a memorable event
• Post a picture of yourself as a child and write about the scariest thing that occurred to you as a child
• Write about the best thing you like about a festival or celebration
• Look outside the window of your room and with about what you see
• Write about a member of a family that has made the most impact on your life

By learning about each other on a personal level, the participants might feel more connected to each other and perhaps may begin forming friendships. In my teaching context in the UAE, students refuse to learn until they feel connected with each other and the teachers.

How would I use Furls?

Mmh .... from the top of my head, I see furls as a way for students to share websites that they have found useful when researching a topic. For instance, a student could furl an interesting website and then e-mail each the URL. In other words, Furl is a convenient tool to save favorites and share them. .........mmh ........Apart from being able to access your favorites from computers other than your own, I'm really at a loss of what to do with this tool.

I think I need to play with this tool a bit more to get a better sense of the possible applications in teaching.

Reflections on Student Blogs

This posting is in response to the week 2 assignment of analyzing 8 student blogs( http://www.beewebhead.net/Evo05/student.htm ). I'm playing catch up in week 3 :)

B….a….a….b…l….e…..

Sleeeep, please sleeeeep, but I can’t

It’s nearly midnight and I can’t sleep. I haven’t written in Babble for a couple of days and feel restless. I need to write there … because ????? I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it’s because some of my peers read it and make comments. Actually, I look forward to the comments. I should read other posts and provide them with positive support – you’re not alone here – this is the underlying message :)

Background

When I joined this course, I had planned on starting a blogging project with my EFL students. Originally, I wanted them to interact with other EFL students. I wanted to collaborate with other teachers so that English would me be used for communication. However, I was wary of my tech skills and knowledge of blogging.

I wanted to know how I could get students to move from "assignment postings" to "writing for pleasure"
...... from structured writing to free writing, from teacher as audience to peers as audience, from assignment writing to writing for themsleves ....

In other words, I would like the students to write about their thoughts, feelings, current events, etc … ie: forming an online community and having social discourse. This way, students learn to express in English, asking their teachers for language support. This would be genuine communication. My enthusiasm was slightly dampened when I tried several Online Learning Environments: MSN Groups and Yahoo! Groups.

..... Sadly, sadly .... When the novelty wore off, the students posted less and less. I never got students to write for their own pleasure, interacting naturally with other peers. The social isolation of Online Learning Environments was a factor. In other words, the biggest problem I have found with OLE is the lack of Social Presence for students. (Garrison, Anderson, and Archer 2000) http://communitiesofinquiry.com/documents/CTinTextEnvFinal.pdf

I’m sure there are other reasons why the project didn’t reach the goal I had envisioned but this escapes me.

How could blogging help?

From looking at the examples provided by Bee online, I think that blogging provides more personal writing mixed with assignment postings. Unlike OLE, students have more control over their posts in their particular blogs – ie: students take ownership of their sites. Both the opportunity for personal writing and student ownership of their sites might improve social presence online.

What could my students blog project be like?

B …. r…. a …i …n … s … t … o … r … m … I … n … g …………BabbLE.

• Like Anne Davis said (in a synchronous meeting at Tapped In on Jan 21st, 2005), start small. Assign FUN short writing tasks. Ask students to post often, fast turnovers.
• Asks students to read other posts and make positive comments to their peers.
• Assess student postings and comments through Bee’s rubric. And provide positive feedback and a suggestion for improvement.
• Ask colleagues to be guest readers of the student blogs and ask them comment on the student posts using their non-teacher hat. Ie: the guest speaker would take the role of a friend rather than their traditional teacher role.
  
• Once students are used to interacting in this medium, then I would like to collaborate with teachers. I would like our two groups to make comments to each others posts.
  

Challenges, challenges

• I am not comfortable with the asynchronous and synchronous blogging tools yet. Only through practice, will I master the skills.
• Make tasks fun! The tasks should not seem tied to what is directly being covered in class. This way, the blog does not seem to be another homework assignment. Sometimes I feel stuck in the rut of covering the curriculum and forget how to make learning fun!

F … e … e … l … I … n … g ……….s … l …E …E …p …y ………. baBBleeeeee.

SnooOOOOoooring....................

Happiness 

Impressions of Learning Times

Babble ... bubbly baBBle ... lots of babbling ...

Wow! That sums up my experience in Learning Times http://www.learningtimes.org .

RRS & Agreggators

I had just read a couple of articles by Will Richardson and then had a synchronous audio meeting with him. It was amazing. The best part of the meeting was when he used the tool Learning Times to exemplify the points made in his article. Using the web browser as a real time visual aid, he showed us how easy it was to subscribe to a web-based aggregator, http://www.bloglines.com , and how to find blogs to feed to the aggregator. Will made it look dead easy: go to a website or blog that has XML, click on that and then use the url of that site in your aggregator.

Before the synchronous meeting, I had read the articles "RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators" and "Blogging and RSS - The 'What's It' and 'How To' of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators". However, I was really feeling a bit anxious with the idea that I would have to sit in front of the computer and spend hours following the directions in order to use an aggregator and RSS. And, I was wondering whether I wouldn't rather go diving instead :) After the online demonstration, I feel more confident about trying it out.


Synchronous Meetings Revitalises Learning

This synchronous meeting was placed in the most opportune time - at the beginning of the whole week's task. If it wasn't for the regular synchronous meetings, I think I would have stalled in my learning, like a pilot stalling his plane when the learning curve gets too steep. Now, I'm spurred on to learn, read and contribute.

Synchronous Meetings provide social presence online

This is the third synchronous meeting and I'm getting a sense of how important it is to NOT miss them, psychologically speaking. I mean synchronous meetings re-energize me since I no longer feel isolated. I need to be reassured that I belong to a group of learners. I think synchronous meetings provide social presence for participants.

More Social Tasks Needed in Synchronous Meetings

I loved it when we identified where we came from on the virtual map of Learning Times and drew pictures of us. These activities shouldn't be eliminated when we are short of time at the beginning of meetings.

After the formal synchronous meeting, I only wish there was more time for Q&A, so that I could ask incidental questions not related to the meeting. In other words, I want the opportunity to be off-task. This way, I can get better connected to my moderators - rapport building. For some strange reason I need to be reassured that the moderators are thinking of me - need for teacher presence online. And, it would be fun to interact with the other participants on a social level - social presence for participants. I guess I am a social learner and the social contact is vital.


Thoughts on Learning Times

This is a great synchronous tool that provides audio and text-based Computer-mediated Communication. It also has a virtual blackboard and a virtual data projector, for example to display your webrowser. Unfortunately, the user needs to have their own computer to download the software. In other words, Alado is more flexible since you can use it from any machine, for example an internet cafe. But Learning Times looks sleek!

Bubble Babble ... double baBBLe ... lovely babbLE.

Impressions of Alado

The context

This was first synchronous many-to-many audio meeting and it was pretty impressive.

But first, let me tell you the difficulties I had to overcome. I hadn't planned on making it to the real-time meeting because of prior commitments. However, I was able to escape earlier than anticipated, and I slipped and slid my way to the internet cafe.

Babble ... by the way, i'm in Szczecin, Poland ( check out the map at http://www.northwestpoland.org/Images/Poland/map.gif ) attending a wedding a reunion, so i had to work out of an internet cafe, which was open 24 hours ... babbLe.

Getting back to what I was saying ... snow was falling and the roads were full of puddles - got a bit wet :) I managed to get a seat in the cafe and tried three different computers: One didn't have an audio/microphone, another kept freezing ... but was lucky the third time round. I had broadband, the sound was loud and clear. Was glued to my seat watching the slides being projected, played with the synchronous writing interface and tried to speak ... but couln't get the mike before the others :) James Farmer's talk was interesting and matched the paper he had written. I had a great time.

Reflection on Alado

This is a wonderful many-to-many audio synchronous Computer-mediated Communication tool. The interface was dead easy. I was looking for more buttons to push and play with but had to seat and listen. Turn-taking for the mike was strange. It felt like a game of musical chairs at times - everyone trying to get the last chair!

The internet cafe was playing loud background music and I wasn't sure if this would distract the others when I would talk. However, I never got a chance this time round. Next time, watch out! :)

It was neat that you could do text-cmc while listening to a speaker. James did a wonderful job of giving his talk and answering questions as they arose - very smooth James. In otherwords, the text-based cmc features provides instant feedback to the speaker, allowing a dialogue instead of just a monlogue.

I was also impressed with the projections of webpages and slides.

Questions, questions, questions?

1. a) How does one project the webpages or slides?
b) Can any of the participants do this or only the moderators?
c) what type of doucments can be projected - .doc, .ppt, html?

2. a) Can anyone sign up for Alado? If so, how does one do this?
b) Can one bring a class of students on Alado and keep others out?

In conclusion, this is a wonderful tool, and it really felt like entering a classroom while a lecture was taking place. The text-based cmc was like whispers to neighbours, with the lecturer being able to overhear and make comments to the audience. I need more practice with peers before I can introduce it to students.

Babble, bubbly, buBBles, babbLE.
Azzam