Category Archives: Good Teaching

Moving Intersubjectivity from Margin to Mainstream in Threaded Discussions

Live blogging the last session at USDLA2012

Moving Intersubjectivity from Margin to Mainstream in Threaded Discussions
Presenter: Dr. Barbara Hall, Instructional Consulting Group

Getting Started

Barb is passionate about the quality of threaded discussions – and is on a mission to help us all understand intersubjectivity.

She believes that when we say we want more interaction, we really mean that we want more intersubjectivity.

We had an interesting side conversation about courses that are built around discussion, and courses where the discussion is a small piece of the course. This is an area that I’d like to think about further…

She had a great slide with a stack of research about the lack of quality in discussion… My question though is about the differences in the type of knowledge being learned – i.e. undergraduate chemistry vs. a graduate level education course… some knowledge is better suited to socially constructed knowledge?

We got into another great side conversation on questions that ask for a “right answer” vs. “multiple perspectives”. Low level Bloom’s taxonomy aren’t good for discussions.

Interaction

Solitary puzzle pieces, passing the conversation back and forth, but not building anything new

Intersubjectivity

Interlocking puzzle pieces – they are connected to each other – something new is built

“the representation of knowledge construction achieved through a synergistic progression from individual contributions to sequences of interdependent contributions” Hall 2011

Facilitating for Intersubjectivity

  • It’s the format of the discussion question
  • It’s also how the discussion is facilitated
  • Summarizing at the end of the discussion – how has your learning changed based on what you heard from your classmates during that week
  • You need time for these type of connections to develop
  • Facilitator needs to refer back to other students and other posts from previous weeks and different students – i.e. Joe said… and Linda said… and how do those two connect?
  • Repeating the other person’s name so you know whose idea you are building from; using names is critical
  • Facilitator needs to MODEL intersubjectivity

Interesting Side Conversations

  • The medium: threaded discussion vs. blogs vs. VoiceThread
  • The issue with texting type writing in the discussion board; teaching academic writing; someone shared that there is research on the language of discourse vs. the language of intimacy. Teach students to use the language of discourse, use APA in the discussion area, etc.
  • References I shared with Barb to connect to her work: the Listening Taxonomy and More Than Words papers from AERA that I blogged here.

When Might Interaction Be Sufficient

When is it less critical for intersubjectivity and interaction might be sufficient?

  • When consensus isn’t necessary or isn’t the goal
  • When time is short
  • With lower order thinking skills: applying, understanding, remembering (side note that applying can easily jump to creating with a little tweaking)

Finally

Finally she suggests that threaded discussions are social constructionism because the threaded discussion is actually an artifact (Papert).

Graphical Representation

To close, each participant used the items supplied in a bag to make an illustration of the concept of intersubjectivity.

Technologies and Techniques for the Busy Online Teacher

I’m attending the USDLA 2012 conference, and this live blog post is on a session titled: “Technologies and Techniques for the Busy Online Teacher”

Presenter: Darcy Christianson, Online Educator  and Consultant
She teaches for Phoenix, Devry, and elementary/high school classes for Johns Hopkins.
Tricks and technologies for efficiency (for excellent feedback and instructor interaction)

Text Replacement and Formatting for Feedback and Comments

  • text replacement, formatting for feedback and comments
  • Software: www.shortkeys.com
    • Fee based (it’s about $20). There’s a light version that lets you have just 15 keys. You can get a site license also.
    • Problem – it’s easy to forget your codes. If you create too many it’s too complicated.
    • Shortkeys provides format options
    • She has a list of the common codes for a specific assignment
    • She just wrote “\essay” and it popped in a nice little note for the student right within the paper
    • her feedback is super specific – explains the problem and how to fix it (very descriptive text) and great feedback to students. It can be long because she isn’t tired of writing the option over and over!
    • insert comments (the word feature) is a problem on tablets, ipads, etc. it doesn’t show up for the studnets. – so she doesn’t use that – she writes inside the text
    • it takes some front end work to set it up for yourself –
    • the key works inside the LMS as well – she uses the / but short keys can set anything up.

Excel for Feedback and Scoring

  1. She puts rubrics in Excel so that the rubric calculates the grades automatically.
  2. She has the comments set up with an if statement – and has preset comments she uses for Great, Fair and Poor. So if she puts in the score, it automatically fills in the comments for her. Pretty sweet!
  3. It takes a while to set it up, but makes it much faster.
  4. She said students say “I know I didn’t do very well in your course, but the feedback you gave me was awesome!”

Video Capture

  • She uses Jing: www.techsmith.com/jing.html
  • It’s a personal touch for the students.
  • It’s a great feature but her students are entry level and can barely do email. The student has to have updated hardware and wouldn’t be able open the file. Important to think about the audience – the skill of the students, etc.
  • In the demo, she scrolled through the document, and commented specifically on each area. This might work well for giving dissertation feedback – these students may have better technology access to view it.
  • Someone asked her about audio feedback – she said it would be boring because the student can’t see anything.
  • If she was doing this, she would give all the files – the info in Word, in Excel, and the Jing. The file without the Jing is 60K; with the Jing it’s 5M. Filesize is a huge issue
  • There’s a 5 minute limit for Jing.

Conclusions

  • It’s less pressure for the faculty and a better learning experience for the student
  • Takes time to set up, but is a long term benefit
  • She gets good comments from students on the quality of feedback they receive

Audience Feedback and Comments

  • Someone suggested Tegrity because the video could be streamed.
  • Someone else suggested saving it to a PDF – she said that her students still have to work with the file, so it’s better to keep it in Word.

Reflection

  • Darcy clearly has some great strategies! This was a super session with great tips.
  • What about you? What do you use to give useful feedback to students?

Reflection: Muddled Thinking about K12, Higher Ed, Learning and Research

I feel the beginning of a shift in my thinking. I can hardly articulate it right now, but here’s a stab at it….

When I was working in K12, I always had this thought that most higher ed schools of education were “behind the times” in use of technology. I know, sounds terrible to put it in writing, and potentially shocking, but I had that kind of a gut feeling. Teachers always raved about the practical usefulness of our training, workshops, and courses.

But now it seems like I’m seeing a little bit of a light (or going to the dark side as my K12 buddies might think!).  I’m seeing a focus on depth of learning, systematic assessment, concern about using technology in ways that actually encourage higher level thinking – that focuses on learning as the innovation – not necessarily the latest gadgets or free online tools.

When I reflect on the majority of what I hear in edtech circles – it seems like much of it is racing after the latest cool tool. There are certainly some excellent exceptions in the K12 world – thinking of Whirlidurb’s work in particular. You could think of more, I’m sure!

What do you think? I know now I have readers from both worlds… am I crazy? Maybe it’s not really a higher ed vs. K12 thing. Instead it’s a focus on gadgets vs. a focus on learning. And what I’ve seen in the three sessions I’ve attended so far here at AERA, there’s a strong focus on learning and how we know if students are learning. That’s where it’s at, right?!

I’m also thinking that the thoughtfulness I’m seeing is not making it out to the K12 world very well. For example, there are interesting taxonomies on wiki use that would be incredibly helpful in all the workshops out there for wiki use in the classroom. I guess that’s the point of the conference theme – To Know is Not Enough – but it also seems to me that the structure of publishing and research in higher ed puts barriers to this knowledge getting out to where it can be used.