I wonder to what extent the challenges are based on my discipline and the way I want to teach it, with research in primary sources and less emphasis on the factual and the narrative. I have serious problems with the “story telling” approach to History, particularly since everyone thinks they can be a historian because everyone has a history and they think other people’s are just sets of facts, past or present. Or that the past is “just stories”, with no scholarly rigor required.

I will give it another chance, but not, I think in this format.

I flipped some years ago with an activity-oriented class (information literacy), so it is easy to do advanced on-site training with the students. But still I make 10 sessions out of 13 mandatory. So even if they pass all the graded assignments (one blog post per week, creating an assignment + sample solution about the two main topics of the class) a student will not get her credits, unless I got at least 10 signatures. And – I always count the number of students sitting in the classroom against the number of signatures on the form; they try at least once a term

The advantages I feel for me when flipping: I make closer contact with the students, I learn about their misunderstandings much earlier, I learn new things they know, I save time for personal support.

The advantages my students report (if it comes to evaluation at the end of the term): self-regulated learning, continuous learning, no final exam. At the end they admit that it’s the better way.

Maybe you could add some searches for the sources. This could make the subsequent reading of the sources more motivating or interesting. And let them create quests. This is fun and they have to know the topic.

So, give flipping one more chance.

Personally, I really enjoy the loose, open nature of change11. This could be because I’ve participated as a non-credit student, or because I am older and more used to self-directed study and exploration. For me, the live sessions serve as the centre for the course, and the most exciting part. I love to witness the unfolding and morphing of ideas within a group in real time. The CSDCG model (that’s a hard acronym to remember – I’m not sure it will catch on!) is closer to my experience of informal learning – when you can, as you can, and how you can. However, I do think we need better tools and technologies for creating and saving useful connections and spaces in a way that helps us to conceptualise and map what we are finding and the ideas and individuals that we are connecting to. We will all attempt to do what we can with the tools at our disposal in any case, but they are far from intuitive or “natural” at the moment. There is also a tension, I think, between our desire (or the imposed wish of others) for individual autonomy and responsibility at one end, and collective (or community) efforts on the other. We are social beings, and even nomads travel in tribes. I’ve been intrigued by the seeming contradiction in our efforts to escape the claustrophobia and control of groups and communities, while, at the same time, trying to build social connections and enable collaborative action. I am also interested in the figure/ground problem – if the subject is fluid but the environment remains stable, we know where we are; if the environment is unstable, but the subject remains fixed, we can manage that, too, but when the subject and its environment are undergoing simultaneous transformations, we are lost.

Mark

Downes’ email should not have become central to the class – it evolved that was in CCK08 because people were lost and needed a central source of information. And it does have class location – there is a central website for information. But the class activity takes place in a distributed environment, practicing what it being preached in a very elegant way that allows for exploration of these issues while experiencing distributed learning as a student. The extent to which it can be applied to something less self-referential is still an open question.

The question “where is the class?” is a very interesting one. As you point out, the distributed model is a pedagogical shift that many students have difficulty adjusting to. In the first session of the CCK12 MOOC (http://cck12.mooc.ca/), Stephen Downes made it clear that, with a connectivist approach, “there is no central place where the course takes place”. He described the daily newsletter is the only “centrepoint”. Downes highlights autonomy as one of the four basic principles of networked learning (along with diversity openness and interactivity). George Siemens noted with concern that many participants found the relative lack of structure difficult to manage in the first few weeks.

But it isn’t just our mental model of how teaching and learning is normally structured that is challenged; we also lack a conceptual map that could help us to work out where we are, where others are, and where useful information, archives of discussions, and other resources can be found. Pedagogical autonomy is reflected in the structural autonomy of the spaces where (mostly) asynchronous conversations are sited. Flattening the hierarchy and reducing control over learning is mirrored by the leveling of the information landscape, creating a low density suburban sprawl that frustrates our efforts to create a sense of place, community, and belonging. This, too, seems deliberate, as the aim is to discourage groups and communities (which can be exclusionary and inward looking) and encourage a dynamic, open network in which participants are constantly on the move, making and breaking connections as they peruse their individual learning objectives. The resulting support structures might approximate what Marcos Novak described years ago as “liquid architecture”: an architecture “whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder” (1991 http://goo.gl/Qw2Jm).

If, instead, we wanted to strengthen our conceptual map of the online environment, we could look to some classic text, like Kevin Lynch’s “The Image of the City” (http://goo.gl/CNUPw & http://goo.gl/Fu8d3), or Jane Jacobs’ “Death and Life of Great American Cities” (http://goo.gl/4Cbja). Where are the paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks online? What is the equivalent of “eyes on the street”? Where is the street? Where are the semi-public spaces that could encourage conviviality and social life? If learning is, in part, a social activity, how can we structure space to enhance the social component of online learning?

Mark McGuire

I think the point you make about “class is here.” Is right. Having run distributed blogs, a combined course blog, and discussion boards, what is key in using any of them is a centralized hub where students can go to reach the other content. In an lms (where I did the discussion boards), everything is automatically centralized (to an extent). The same with the combined course blog–there is truly just one location. Using distributed blogs, I found that organizing the students into groups and having clear instructions on who they were supposed to interact with built into the central course site (WP) easily overcame the potential chaos of the distributed model.

To a certain extent, it seems less important what the particular form of interaction is (personal blogs, course blog, or discussion board) and more the way the students are given access to these forms. As you say, they’re used to a centralized model, so they feel more comfortable being guided through that centralized space to the other student’s spaces.

Of course that’s just pedagogically speaking, ethically speaking on the other hand . . . .