A great way to capture life where your live

Over the last two days we had constant snow (actually the whole month of January and it looks like February is on its way). The Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences has begun to keep a blog (which it started a few years ago but abandoned until this semester). As part of their blog, they included a time lapse of 52 hours of the various storms we had passing through. It is really impressive to watch.

The educational value of the blog is interesting to me. The school connects to the community and community is able to use the knowledge and understanding the school is creating.

American Politics: a study in frustration and poor communication

We have one more week until the general elections and I'm totally disgusted. So much so that for the first time in almost 30 years, I don't want to cast my ballot. Why? Because I don't see much difference between the extreme voices that I must vote for. If I could, I would attend the Rally to restore Sanity in Washington, DC this week.

I see this current situation as a breakdown in communication in the US society. One thing that Americans always prided themselves on was the right to debate and discuss various issues. However, the "you're either with us or against us" attitude of many politicians (on both side of the aisles) and the vilifying of anyone whose position might hurt those in power or the media (which is big business in the US) has made it possible for the discussion to be squelched in the US.

I had had great hopes at the beginning of the Obama administration. Here was an administration that was elected by communicating using new media. However, over the last two years more and more voices are being quieted as people become afraid to express their opinions.

The White House, who had online live conferences in which the average person was able to participate, changed its media strategy and these conferences are almost non-existent now. In fact, last year when the President came to our area, those on the "invitation" list were politicians and those who held local power, rather than the common man who supposedly would benefit from the programs the president was speaking about. On the White House website, there was a video that explained how the president's 10 letters from the public (which he reads daily) was chosen. The letters are filtered through his staff, who choose the letters "most representative" of the letters coming in. This filtering, however, ensures that the present will only see the views that the staff feel are relevant. Why do the staff have to filter the letters? Don't they report on the issues they read about in the letters? Think of the variety of issues (come of which may not be covered by organizations sending in mass mailings or covered in the press) if 10 letters were chosen randomly. The farmer in Kansas struggling to make it, would have the same possibility of being heard as the unemployed single mother being thrown out of her house in Florida, or the prosperous rancher in Montana, or the factory worker in Michigan.

Most importantly, however, is that the issues would not be predetermined. Those issues that many of my friends and I feel are important are not being discussed. No one talks about the widening gap in income in the US between the very rich and the middle class. No one speaks about the tripling of prices of pharmaceuticals in the last 10 years, or the monopoly that 6 oil producers have in the US which allows for the price of oil to increase even though the supply in the US is the highest it's been for a number of years. No one speaks of the two United States: one in which a person's housing, education, health care, access to services, child care, and retirement are guaranteed and the other where any of these basic rights can be taken away at any moment.

So my hope for the US is to create an environment where civil dialog was acceptable, neighbors could live next door to each other even though they had differing views on how society should function, and a person was not afraid to express their ideas on various topics. Finally, communication is two way. This means there needs to be an honest dialog between those speaking and those listening. Listening does not mean agreeing with the speaker and speaking does not mean making your ideas known without determining if your message was received the way you wanted it to. Then I would feel as if my vote was one of many in a civil democracy.

Update: Of course, today there was a live online conference and there are more planned for the next week. Let's hope they continue to do so AFTER the elections.

Being embarrased on LinkedIn: learning a new tool

As I mentioned in my previous posting, my students had an online conference last week which was totally student developed and student run. I gave them benchmarks and guidelines, then left the marketing strategy up to them. One of my students asked if I could post their message about the conference to groups I belonged to.

I have not used linkedin very much as I am still trying to get a feeling for how to use it. I do belong to some groups and follow their discussions, occasionally responding to requests. As many of you know, I like the interaction, but have found it difficult to engage in any real meaningful discussion so far on linkedin.

As I was posting the announcement to various groups I am part of, I questioned whether I should post the announcement to "discussion" or "news" as I did not want to just make the announcement, but also allow for any questions. I posted my student's announcement exactly as he had written it and wanted to be able to engage in any discussion about the project itself should anyone have a comment or question. So I posted it in the discussion area.

Well, for one group, obviously I posted it in the wrong section as I received the following message:

Virginia, please do not post announcements on the Discussion tab (you know what a discussion is, don't you?). Use the News tab for these.

I was mortified and extremely embarrassed. I felt like I was back in grade school when I spoke out of turn or made a mistake and was made to feel like a complete idiot. What was worse was this comment was written by someone who is an instructional designer. I can only hope that he does not interact directly with students. I asked which group he was part of so that I could withdraw from the group.

The fact is, even though I did not know this person, the lack of leeway he gave to someone that obviously is not active in the group makes me uncomfortable being part of the group. This is an important lesson for me that online groups who have rigid rules of conduct, should have detailed instructions/guidelines. Without the guidelines, facilitators should be open to any interaction, being careful in how they give feedback to help a "newbie" feel welcome, rather than embarrassing them because they did not understand the social norms of the community.

Web 3.0 or Neo-Web 1.0?

Lately, I have felt that the discussions have ended and I am no longer a part of a community online. With the advent of tools like twitter and even the changes to facebook, I feel that we have reverted back to "I'm going to give you sound bites and it is up to you to listen or not. I'm not really interested in your opinion."

I felt that when the new web tools first were established (blogs, myspace, etc...) that there was a renewed engagement between people in cyberspace. Suddenly those that never had a voice were given a voice to craft their message and engage in dialogue. Time was not as much of a factor. A deeper level of understanding between writers and readers was established.

However, I currently have three facebook accounts. One is actually my daughter's, the other is just for family and friends, and the last is for students and colleagues. I post, but there is always a resounding silence after. I am sure for many of my students, I my comments are hidden. With so many comments coming in, many of them just have very superficial conversations.

Now don't get me wrong. I see a valuable service in facebook and twitter, especially when you want to communicate information to a large group of people quickly. But there is no two way communication the way a blog or a ning or even the original design of facebook allowed. And what two way communication there is usually private, so there is not the same level of community. I also feel that the people that originally embraced the Web 2.0 to give themselves a voice they never had have been pushed aside for commercial and mainstream opinion leader's use. It is a bit like starting a conversation with someone in the popular group when you were in high school and having the rest of the popular group join in and push you out to the side because you aren't part of their group.

I hope we go back to the idea of community on the web and the feeling of belonging in an online community. But I'm not sure that can happen in today's battlefield over users (how many friends can YOU collect?). What do you think? (I have a feeling without tweeting this, there will just be a big resounding "silence." Oh, well).

Public vs. private learning

I currently am setting up my courses (three different ones) for next semester. As I do so, I need to determine the best tools for my students. One issue that has come up repeatedly each semester is how to maintain privacy laws (Family Education Privacy Act), but allow access to learning in a public manner.

FERPA laws require that I have tools that students are either guaranteed anonymity when they use the tool (school based secure tools) or are given the choice of how much information they reveal about themselves, including the option of not participating in a "public" forum. This leads to a number of restrictions when deciding on which tools to use and how to use them.

Last semester I used Ning. In many ways, this is a great tool for public discussions. Even the private emails and the use of the approval function for video uploads allowed for a certain amount of privacy. However, I still did not trust Ning's privacy controls enough to upload grades or receive individual assignments. As a result, this semester I decided to use Blackboard's grading and assignment features. In designing the new course, however, I remembered why I don't like Blackboard. The assignment and grade features are very time consuming and cumbersome to set up. As I've mentioned before, I miss the ease of Prometheus, which was bought by WebCT, but whose features seemed to be discarded.

I have yet to find an easy syllabus program that fit the ease of Prometheus's. I could set up a course in a day, using the Prometheus template. I know it will take about 2-3 days per course to set up the courses on Blackboard. In addition, I want to still use the Ning and a Wiki for the interschool projects I am designing for two of the three courses I'm teaching.

All of these have made be wonder about the importance of having both public and private learning spaces. I use Private learning spaces to help motivate my students to take chances, fail, and learn from their mistakes. I use public learning spaces to help students feel a sense of responsibility for their own and others learning, help create synergy in learning, and create a sense of community in learning (rather than learning being something that is done in isolation).

So what are the differences in private and public learning spaces? How can we work with administrators to create both? How do we balance security issues with sharing of knowledge and community building?

Group meaning making

Here is a continuation of the paper on group knowledge making I began in December.

Creating Meaning

As we have already discussed, meaning is created when there is cognitive dissonance. However, the extent to which individual understanding a) correlates to the group, b) deviates from the original meaning, and c) influences the group’s shared knowledge is dependent on the level and type of interaction. There are three ways that interaction creates meaning: through conflict, type of talk, and level of discussion.

Group dynamics researchers have identified two types of intragroup conflict: a) task, and b) procedural (Jehn & Mannix, 2001; Jehn, et al. 1999, Simons & Peterson, 2000). Task conflict refers to differences in the problem, task, procedures, implementation, and final actions. Jehn & Mannix found that task conflict improves group performance and outcomes, probably because conscious choices about the process are made. This ties into Yakhlef’s (2002) conclusion that in moving from being (because it has always been that way) to knowing (applying knowledge to multiple contexts) knowledge is created.

Relational conflict, on the other hand often threatens individual’s personal and social identities. As a result, these types of conflict can be disruptive to the group process, perhaps resulting in an individual’s isolation within a group. However, not all task conflict is positive and not all relational conflict is negative. Therefore is it important to identify constructive and destructive conflict.

In resolving task or relational disputes, a conflict is destructive to the group when it isolates or divides members to the extent that sharing is no longer happening. On the other hand, conflict which takes down impediments to sharing, such as differences in mental models, in constructive (Ayoko, Hartel, & Callan, 2002). In addition, temporal factors such as time pressures caused by deadlines, frequency of interaction, and length of time together, can have a positive or negative effect on conflict (Jehn & Mannix; Waller, et al. 2001) . The absence of conflict creates little opportunity for an individual to learn within the group (Yonkers & Buff, 2005).

If there is little conflict in an online interaction it can mean one of two things: a) the individual has the same knowledge as others within the group, therefore cannot learn from the group, or b) the individual is not interacting with the group to negotiate understanding, but rather is creating meaning from his or her perspective. In the second case, while learning is taking place, there is no shared cognition or group learning per se.

Content analysis which identifies the amount of conflict and type of conflict (task, relational, destructive, and constructive) will help researchers determine opportunities for intragroup learning. It would be important to look at the duration of the conflict, the timing of the conflict, and the intensity of the conflict over time.

Mercer’s social way of thinking or types of talk, gives insight on the level of intragroup meaning creation (Wegerif, et al., 1999). Mercer identified three modes in which students interact in problem solving: disputational talk, cumulative talk, and exploratory talk. Each of these modes are increasingly more complex in the interaction process. As groups move from disputational to exploratory talk, individual reasoning contributes more to shared understanding. Disputation talk is a simple disagreement or an individualized contribution, without any explanation or intent to negotiate meaning. Cummulative talk is a non-critical addition to previous group contributions, with the intent to add to knowledge without negotiating meaning. Exploratory talk includes judgment and evaluation in contributing to the discussion, with the intent to negotiate meaning with group members.

Related to the types of talk is the level of discussion. Jarvela and Hakkinen (2002) identified three levels of discussion in their research. The first was a higher level, which was characterized as abstract and theory based. The second level was progressive. In progressive discussions, students begin with experience in order to build reciprocity and shared knowledge. Knowledge was created by building on previous postings, but there was never any abstraction or theory applied. Finally, lower level discussions are a series of non-related or individually presented postings that do not add to a shared meaning for the group.

In analyzing how groups and individuals in groups interact to create meaning, researchers can identify the impact that groups have on individuals, the impact that individuals have on groups, and the ways in which individuals and groups make meaning. This category also begins to identify the choices an individual makes when creating knowledge. This also begins to address the issue of the depth of student learning. A group with a low level of conflict, disputational talk, and lower level discussion will probably need to have individual assessments to determine what an individual has learned. However, it is much easier to assess student learning in a high conflict group which uses exploratory talk and higher level discussions. In addition, even if a group member is not an active participant, Olivera & Straus’ (2004) suggests that just by being in the group, he or she will learn more.

Web 2.0 and community building

I still ponder what goes on within the virtual world that is different than the face to face world. The other day I thought that we should be looking at the use of 2.0 tools in conjunction with community building. Vicki Davis's blog triggered this thought with her discussion of building a "blogging" audience and the interaction of the blog.

One of the key factors in community building is trust. Ruth Brown's study on community building brings in many of the factors that I think are important in the use of Web 2.0 tools. I have found, for example, that as my students get to know each other better, they are more apt to use the wiki and edit each other's works. Community comferment, in the form of comments and answers to comments, is a turning point, I think, to developing a blog. Dr. Brown found many causal conditions in the development of distance learning communities that I think could be applied to the success or failure of Web 2.0 tools.

So what are the attributes of "community" within Web 2.0 communities? And what types of communities are created? How can group dynamic theory help us to improve learning in these communities?