on starting many groups...
George Siemens
Just a random observation:
We're coming up against the one significant challenge that faces us online: decentralization is vital for allowing individuals to create their own context of learning...and centralization is vital for making sense of the larger whole (at least for most people).
It's great to see different groups forming - with some meeting F2F, others conducting the course in their own language. And the use of different tags allows group members to create an information base targeted to a specific group.
What's quickly becoming evident to me is how difficult (and for some, I suspect, frustrating) it will be to keep track of conversations that focus on multiple narrow contexts. Essentially, everyone will be missing parts of the conversation. The value of content and conversation centralization as a means of making sense is under a fair bit of pressure. It's a fascinating challenge. And I have no clue how to resolve it :). I am looking forward to see how things play out and how future initiatives like this can manage that key challenge.
George
--
Blog/Site:
www.elearnspace.org
www.connectivism.ca
www.knowingknowledge.com
Moira Hunter
Hi George and all,
I was happy to find this email as it comforted me in my random thoughts to-date which were “Hey, have I missed something? Has the course started? Is it over?” as I received different invites to different groups. I decided to ‘sit’ on my invites, thinking “If this is happening now, what will it be like when the action really starts?” It could be frustrating for some as you imply but what about the time element too? So, I already feel as if I’m missing parts of the conversation but have decided to go with that and nearer the time of the course start, I’ll go with the flow as it comes but I’m not provoking the flow yet, if that makes sense.
Looking forward to seeing other comments here as googlegroups is a great place to converse too J
Moira
De : connec...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:connec...@googlegroups.com] De la part de George Siemens
Envoyé : mercredi 30 juillet 2008 21:29
À : connec...@googlegroups.com
Objet : on starting many groups...
Barbara Dieu
distributed groups represent, the pull and the push, the centrifugal
and centripetal forces.
What I find most fascinating , however, is to observe the flows, how
people are reacting, how they organize themselves openly , in an
effort to make it happen, before the course has even started and with
no direct control of the tutors. Also, looking at the different tools
being used - how they hamper or facilitate this flow. This is
basically a preview of the course - it's happening in practice,
before the discussion of the theory :-)
As one of you mentioned during the recording made last Sunday on
EdTech Talk - what participants "learn" will depend very much on
their time and involvement . Like in any "natural" learning situation,
each one of us will take from it what we understand, what we need and
can. With such a number of people, we will find both converging and
diverging threads and we will jump into the discussions or practice
that resonate with us.
Warm regards,
Bee
--
Barbara Dieu
http://dekita.org
http://beewebhead.net
DolorsCapdet
Certainly, this is also a problem for all apprentices.
One solution might be to periodically summarize the forum of each
group and make it available to everyone.
If someone is interested in deeper into the topic, can directly access
the forum of the group.
Best regards,
Dolors
http://dolorscapdet.blogspot.com/
http://e-learningglobal.es/
Jim Lerman
Here's a thought that popped into my head while reading this post:
I'm wondering if a potential approach to this situation might lie in
RSS.
If each group were to be sure to constitute itself in a space that
could generate an RSS feed, then course participants could create a
tab in their RSS aggregator (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc.) for the
course and all the group feeds would make their way to one place for
each participant. To address the issue of course participants knowing
what groups are available, a central wiki-like space could be created
where any group could post its name, a brief description, and the url
for its RSS feed. Course participants could review this space to
choose which feeds they'd like to subscribe to.
Just a thought. Any reactions?
Jim Lerman
Kean University
vcautin
I wonder if there's a way to add a tag into an RSS aggregator. I mean, can I suscribe to a tag?
I also like the idea of periodical summaries, maybe posted in the course wiki.
Regards, Violeta.
Barbara Dieu
RSS is the key and I believe the feeds from delicious and posts
/threads from the various groups are aggregated (by tag: CCK08) to
the Pageflakes of the course
http://www.pageflakes.com/ltc
and to the Moodle platform (see columns on left and right)
http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=20
At Dekita we have used the Orchard <http://dekita.org/orchard> as uber
feed aggregator of what we deem important to filter and people who are
interested in what is being discussed in our kitchen can aggregate
these feeds as well - the whole lot or just individual threads.
In this way you can have your own filter (by using Pageflakes, Google
Reader or any other feed aggregator) and collective ones at different
spots irradiating the conversations from different perspectives.
Warm regards,
Bee
George Siemens
I agree that RSS is an important option in pulling together aspects of the course that are distributed. Personally, I'm a big fan of technology performing cognitive grunt work on my behalf :).
A few challenges:
Functioning in distributed environments is only partly about pulling information together. The biggest challenge, I think, is the conceptual change required by participants to realize that they are constantly missing something (the same is true for instructors/facilitators).
James mentions a central wiki-space to detail groups - makes sense. We do need groups, translations, meetups, and other activities to be detailed somewhere. A wiki makes sense. I see this as a short term solution i.e. it might work for the course, but something more sophisticated is required long term. By way of a quick analogy - Yahoo used to categorize the web. Their home page was a mess. Google changed that. Thinking in categories is intuitive (I still have trouble not using folders in gmail)...but when information is ovewhelmingly abundant, we need to approach the problem by applying intelligence at the point of search, not at the point of classification. What does this look like? Well, sites like technorati, icerocket, and twingly provide tag-based search. They don't always work well. But they are more like what I think information interaction will look like in the long run. When we intentionally expose our ideas to others (through tags, in this case) we can be discovered by services that search and index. What we need then - once we've added context to our ideas by tags - is the option to categorize, remix, or whatever, the data in ways that we want. It might be a pageflakes/netvibes page for now, but in the long run, the organization of data needs to be a bit more intuitive.
With regard to themes - I was contacted by Kyle Matthews on a meme-generator/follower that he has been designing. It does more than simply grab tags (like technorati). It seeks to apply some categorization to a specific subset of information - i.e. it groups ideas by similarities to others. We will be experimenting with this tool in our course.
The other option - as Dolors mentions - is to use good 'ol human intervention. Summarizing topics, creating concept maps, and providing reflections are important. We will likely ask for-credit learners to play a role in this.
Violeta - yes, you can subscribe to tags from technorati, flickr, del.icio.us, in your aggregator.
I appreciate the thoughts/contributions put forward. Keep 'em coming!
Christy
decentralized information into one centralized place for yourself.
That won't help you filter it though, and simply having everything
from the huge river of information might not actually help you make
sense of it.
But imagine if you were at a big party. People would break off into
smaller groups and have their own conversations. Would you expect to
know what's going on with every side conversation at the party? Of
course not. There's no way you could.
Online, we potentially can be part of every conversation, or at least
read them all, as long as it's all open. But just because we can be
part of them all doesn't mean we should. It doesn't mean that taking
in everything is the only way--or even the best way--to learn.
How much you need to participate is an individual decision, but I have
no delusions that I'm going to read everything. George is right; we're
all going to be missing parts of the conversations. And that's OK; I
accept that I can't take it all in. I expect I may have a deeper
learning experience by mostly focusing on a few narrow conversations
and letting the rest float by me.
Christy Tucker
Experiencing E-Learning
http://christytucker.wordpress.com