Tag: blogroom

CCK09: Connectivism and Connective Knowledge

(Versione italiana)

Last year I participated to the online course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge given by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. It was a great experience that influenced deeply my practices. It is a good new that they will deliver another version in the fall of this year.

One of the interesting features of these courses is that everyone is free to participate in its own way. This year it will not possible for me to attend the course as I did last year. Nevertheless, I subscribed with the intention of  posting during the course about a work I’m doing that I believe is related to some of the topics  that will be faced in this new version. I will try to listen to those that share similar interests in CCK09.

In this first post I’m going to outline this work.

The objective is to investigate the potential of web 2 technologies to improve the learning experience in a variety of graduate and post graduate courses. Basically, with the method I’m investigating, the teacher tries to facilitate the personal involvement and the practice of the students by keeping to a minimum its own interventions. From the technical point of view, the teaching method is based on the use of blogs and feed syndacation. Both the students and teachers use the blogs to write assignments, to pose questions, to comment and to collaborate. More details are available in this paper (pdf).

My thesis is that by means of the blog community and a sensible conduit of the teacher it is possible to give life to a phenomenon akin to what Etienne Wenger described as a community of practice (CoP), where the feeling of common objectives, the active collaboration among participants and the development of a set of common practices, substantially improve the process of meaning creation and, consequently, the learning experience. However, in my perspective the role of the teacher should not be that of controlling and managing that community as it is often intended when talking about CoPs. Instead, I see this community as something that should grow by itself, free to establish connections with resources, people, organizations and networks that are external to the class environment, much in the sense of connectivism as it has been formulated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes.

Thus, the class is the place where I welcome my students but then I try to bring them “outside” through what I’m calling the “blogroom”. The blogroom is a living community and the teacher has to take care of it as it is common with every newborn form of life. When you are taking care of a living being – it could be a newborn infant  as well as a grove or anything else – the most important thing is to learn to observe it before doing anything.

The blogroom community is a living being because it is composed of humans but it is also a living being in its whole. The teacher should be able to see this creature being aware that its well being is of great importance to improve substantially the learning experience of its components.

The main objective of this work is to explore methods to observe this community, supporting, but not replacing, the complex subjective impressions and feelings of the teacher. Since the life of the blogroom is trackable in all its details, the idea is to use methods of the social network analysis to extract relevant information from its traces.

The method is based on a set of web services and open source tools that allow one to extract the history of the blog community and to perform statistical and graphical network analysis on such data. The tools are 1) Google Reader for feed aggregation, 2) Google Docs for management of students data, 3) a set of Ruby packages to automatically browse the internet and exctract data from web services, 4) the Statnet package of the R environment for social network analysis and, finally, 5) some software I’m writing in Ruby myself to glue all together.

In this method, a variety of social network analysis tools are used to evaluate the part of students activities beyond the minimum trivial level constituted of a standard sequence of assignments. These evaluations may be done both on longitudinal studies as well as to compare different students populations. Conventional measures of networks as well as recent network modelling methods based on exponential-family random graph models (ERGM) are used.

This is a no cost project since all these web sevices, software tools and software languages are free and I will use them as long as they will remain free.

During the next months I will posts on specific aspects of this work.

Il mio primo sociogramma

Aggiorno questo post aggiungendo il sociogramma di una blogoclasse molto più ampia (123 studenti) sotto al precedente. Continuerò ad aggiornare questo post sino a che non avrò materiale per scrivere un pezzo più organico.

Questo è il primo sociogramma che ho ottenuto. Descrive la vita di una delle blogoclassi dell’ultimo semestre e rappresenta un primo risultato delle attività che ho descritto nel post precedente.

Contatti nella vita di una blogoclasse
Contatti nella vita di una blogoclasse
blgrm_MED_09_circ
Contatti nella vita di una blogoclasse di 123 studenti

Beninteso, l’analisi delle rete sociali va ben oltre la produzione di un diagramma poiché la quantità di metodi matematici e grafici che si possono utilizzare è sconfortante, metodi che vanno prima di tutto capiti …

Comunque, anche un semplice diagramma rende “palpabili” alcuni fatti interessanti.

Ho posto il docente al centro perché così si evidenziano i contatti studente-studente. Se le relazioni fossero state principalmente studente-professore allora il diagramma avrebbe assunto l’aspetto di una ruota di bicicletta, prevalendo i raggi sulle corde. La quantità di corde studente-studente testimonia invece la vitalità della blogoclasse.

Si apprezza anche bene il modo nel quale i vari gradi di partecipazione si distribuiscono fra le persone.

Tutto qua per ora, sono semplicemente contento di avere costruito un metodo per “vedere” meglio dentro alle blogoclassi sia a posteriori che in fieri. Credo che questo metodo possa essere pensato anche come uno strumento didattico, vedremo …

Classe virtuale online

Come avevo anticipato in un post precedente, venerdì 3 luglio alle 21 avrà luogo una classe virtuale intitolata

Classi, comunità di pratica e dintorni

Per partecipare è sufficiente seguire il link precedente e iscriversi gratuitamente al sistema di “online education” WiZiQ. Poi, quando sarà l’ora, collegarsi al sistema e “entrare in aula”.

Può partecipare chiunque, senza alcun limite. Non costa nulla, se qualcosa non funziona non si perde nulla, se funziona può risultare interessante.

L’idea è di creare delle occasioni per parlare delle cose su cui sto lavorando con persone che hanno interessi simili.

Non le chiamo lezioni perché vorrei porre l’enfasi sulla discussione.

In questa prima “puntata” dirò due parole sul lavoro che sto facendo per analizzare le dinamiche che hanno luogo nelle blogoclassi descrivendo i motivi per cui mi pare che esse abbiano la natura di comunità di pratica (la voce inglese di Wikipedia le descrive meglio).

La blogoclasse è il nome che uso per designare le classi dei miei studenti che seguono buona parte o interamente un mio corso mediante un proprio blog, formando una piccola comunità all’interno della blogosfera.

Le comunità di pratica sono interessanti perché sono entità di natura sociale nelle quali le esperienze di apprendimento sono particolarmente legate alla “creazione di significato”.

Durante l’incontro accennerò brevemente anche alle tecniche che sto impiegando per estrarre dati dalla blogosfera al fine di analizzarli. Vorrei commentare come oggi la tecnologia sia divenuta “amichevole”, “liquida”, “libera” nel senso che non costa praticamente niente.

Successivamente ci saranno gli interventi di alcuni studenti della Italian University Line che presenteranno in forma di bozza la loro tesi di laurea. Questi studenti sono insegnanti della scuola elementare e della scuola media che sono giunti al termine del corso di laurea triennale Metodi e Tecniche delle Interazioni Educative (pdf). In questa occasione avranno modo, se lo desidereranno, di fare un prova di esposizione e, al tempo stesso, di avere un’occasione per scambiare idee fra loro e con altri su temi a loro cari.

La partecipazione degli studenti IUL è significativa perché nel corso che hanno appena terminato sono stati protagonisti di un’eccellente esperienza di comunità di pratica.

Poiché è impossibile trovare una data che accontenti tutti, replicheremo l’evento il venerdì 10 luglio, sempre alle 21, in modo da offrire la stessa opportunità agli studenti IUL che non possano partecipare venerdì 3.

CCK08: On writing posts for italian students in english

(Versione in italiano)

We met 10 times with about 200 students of 18 curricula distributed in 7 classes, so far. We have discussed with the students all the options they have as well as the first steps they must take to begin the course.

Among other things we agreed that my posts with their assignments and suggestions will be written in english because they may be seen as contributions to the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course that I’m trying to follow, in some way. It’s interesting that the students can see their teacher playing the role of a learner. I think this is good.

These students are brave in accepting this proposal because they have problems in reading english texts, generally. It’s not their fault but it’s because the italian school is not able to teach foreign languages in an adequate way. Not only english and not only the italian school, incidentally. There may be exceptions, of course, but in the vast majority of cases this is a fact. When I give assignments where the use of english is implicit, such as try or look for something in the scientific literature, about the half of the students claim to have problems with language. And they have studied english for 5 or 8 years. I have problems too, you see it very well from my floundering english. Well, in the ’60 I wanted to learn english because I liked sciences but the school bureaucracy imposed me to learn (badly) french and german. My english is self-learned. That’s one example of poor connections between schools and needs of society.

Any way, dear students, since I know that sometimes you may have some difficulties, I’m proposing you the following.

You are so many that for sure there is someone of you who knows english very well, probably better than me. I propose that you provide the translation in italian of my posts and that you do it in a collaborative way. If you see a translation has been provided by someone else but something is missing, go and update it. You are also encouraged to find english errors in my posts and tell me. My posts will be improved and I will get an extra chance to improve my english, I need it!

I created a wiki page for this post. Just go and try.

Those who will contribute in this way will get an extra grade.

In this sense this is a kind of assignment. Yes, because assignments in this course will be often fuzzy, just suggestions, and they will be very much oriented to foster cooperation and sharing of knowledge you may have. Your personal initiatives in this sense will be graded as assignments. In doing all this you will develop or improve your digital literacy (which is the title of the course) but as a kind of by-product where in reality you will be focused on expressing yourselves about your interests, on sharing them, on reflecting about the role that digital technologies may have in your life, on cooperating, on helping others.

Next steps

In the meanwhile about the half of you wrote your email addresses in the appropriate wiki page. Very good. In the next few days I will send you the form to complete your enrollment. Please, answer to the form when you will be sure about the path to follow: 1) conventional multichoice test, 2) contribution to wiki contents, 3) blogroom activities.

CCK08: Hidden connections?

(Versione in italiano)

Amazing, really. I read Developing Online From Simplicity toward Complexity: Going with the Flow of Non-Linear Learning and what I have found is a perfect description of my experiences with the blogroom I have quoted in other posts here.

In the short paper 1 I said that often one has the feeling that ideas flourish just because the context is mature. Here again.

Renata Phelps is a professional and I’m not, coming recently from other fields. I heard nothing about such ideas in my entourage here. I had absolutely no specific background. I had just to face a large and complex problem: to teach something

  1. changing too fast
  2. to too many students
  3. having extremely different backgrounds.

Nothing else.

And probably, in some other parts of the world there are other people developing similar solutions to similar problems without having an explicit and common background on the subject. Solutions that are in the air brought by a set of hidden connections.

CCK08: A couple of questions

Yes, let’s go for a walk in a wood and relax as many times as you like and with the passing of time you will know that wood in your own way. This means you will be looking for something there and you will disregard the rest.

Jørgen asked me if I’m establishing valuable connections in this course. Yes, I do. Moreover, patterns begin to emerge and it is easier to choose what it is worthwhile to follow but the choice is personal, depending on its own interests and needs.

As far as my connections are concerned, these depend on my wish to improve what I’m trying to offer to my student. Specifically, I’m willing to

1) share my teaching experiences
2) learn from teaching experiences of others
3) gather some general background that may improve teaching practice
4) learn about some useful tools.

Consequently, I like posts that report on teaching experiences or make points that may be of some interests in real teaching practice. In particular, I’m interested in experiences made to test the idea that by means of Web 2.0 tools it is possible to improve the learning experience of students substantially.

I usually like very much Lisa’s posts 🙂 but I was upset by her Highly Exaggerated View of the Implications of Groups, Networks and Collectives. I mean, it depends on specific context so that it is difficult to make such a general point.

For instance the blogroom I’m trying to describe in this blog, represents the attempt to transform the classroom group in a network where concern for others, responsibility for contribution, commitment, getting something accomplished are basic values. Values that are extraneous to the classroom group, where each student works for himself and almost only for a good grade, which rarely means to get something accomplished, I mean really accomplished. I have hundreds of students saying this when asked to give their opinion about the course, four of them provided a translation.

When talking about networks applied to education we should think to a farmer taking care of its field and its crops. With farmer I intend the contadino of first or middle 900 in Italy. Old farmers loved their piece of land and knew what to do to let crops grow by themselves.

We cannot say: “Look these networks, what a mess!” Of course, if there is nobody to take care of them. This is the role of the teacher in network teaching: to create conditions so that the students will learn, share, cooperate, really achieve something autonomously. And they love it if only we give them an opportunity.

In classroom groups the teacher controls processes. In networks teaching the teacher takes care of its network, as the farmer takes care of its crops. We have to love our students. We have to love our network of students. It is such love that will guide us in using technologies appropriately.

Now I have seen, with great joy that there are people sharing, in some ways, this vision.

For instance I was impressed by Lani’s blog. And it is from her Through a different lens — that of shades of grey CCK08 post that I learned, among other things, about the thinwalled classroom of Clarence Fisher. It was really interesting do see similarities and differences between the Yes, I do Grade Blog Posts and my Come procedo per dare i voti nella blogoclasse which in English sounds How do I grade in the blogroom that I wrote last June for my students.

There are other blogs that often give me the feeling to learn something useful when I read them. I will put them in the blogroll here but I’m afraid to miss something interesting somewhere. Therefore, a couple of questions:

  1. If someone is reading this post feeling to have similar experiences to share or to quote, please, let me know.
  2. Is there anyone who is thinking or even trying to extract some patterns of clustering in this course? I mean to find who is primarily interested in theories, or ideological aspects, or sharing teaching experiences and so on?

In other words, if, for instance, I find myself looking for mushrooms more and more often, well, this means that probably my way of knowing the wood is through the mushrooms I can find there and I will look for mushrooms, definitely, trying to not miss the good ones.

CCK08: Asking for help on network analysis of a blogroom

Oh, I enjoyed Valdis Kreb`s presentation Emerging networks (there are .pdf slides) very much. Pretty new stuff for me. I would like very much to try this kind of analysis in my blogrooms. Let’s make an example to look for useful hints.

With blogroom I mean the subset of the blogosphere constituted by the blog of my students. The students have the option to use a blog or to follow the course in a conventional way. If they choose the blog they can use it exactly as one uses a new exercise book: when the course is finished they can continue to use it, they can keep it for record or throw it away. Some more details on the blogroom and on students opinions are in a previous post.

Here I focus on analysis of the results.

The example refers to the class of medicine, 220 students (19-20 year old), first year of curriculum, Spring 2008, three months course on computer literacy.

Distribution of activities:

  • 145 entered the blogroom
  • 30 studied contents and made a final multiple-choice test
  • 7 cooperated in an open educational resources project
  • 38 not yet finished

Total number of posts written during the three months: 2379

Total number of comments written during the three months: 1691

For each blog, I know how many posts have been written and how many comments have been received.

Distribution of posts written by the students
Distribution of posts written in each blog
Distribution of comments to posts of others
Distribution of comments received by each blog

I used RSSOwL to extract these data.

It would be interesting to apply the analysis presented in Emerging networks to these data.

Two questions (before trying to write some code):

  1. Is out there a tool to extract data from a given blog community (list of blog addresses)? For instance, extract, for each student, the number of comments written to a given other’s blog?
  2. Which would be the most appropriate open source tool to generate data of the kind shown in Emerging networks and in Introduction to social network methods ?
%d blogger hanno fatto clic su Mi Piace per questo: