Two Dereks November 15, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : pratodialogue, edublog , add a commentI’ve been reading Derek Wenmoth’s blog since he first joined what was then known as “Ultralab South”, now CORE Education, and often find much to applaud, for example about Personal Learning Environments ( and [2] and [3] and [4]. The other Derek, Chirnside, I’ve read less about but actually met for one day of the Pratodialogue and as a result I’ll be helping to evaluate a new online course with him later. I didn’t know they knew each other and worked ‘just down the road’ in New Zealand. Small planet.
Anyway, I wanted to blog Derek W’s diagram depicting four stages of online participation which may supersede the old cartoons which are sometimes wheeled out, dating back to the dark ages.
Derek’s Blog: Participation Online - the Four Cs
These are all very positive practices and outcomes, which illustrate an ideal rather than typical progression. There’s not much room for disappointment, withdrawal, the spectacular flounce, overboiling frustration, unrequited help, incessant vacuous chat, pointless circular argument, and all the rest of the rich tapestry which goes to make up the human environment online. Well, perhaps some of these are not so common everywhere. The Motivation/Behaviours/Outcome structure is clear and seems useful, but I’m not sure about the four C’s themselves as headings. ‘Commentor’ is ok for a made up word, but Commentator doesn’t have the right connotations to me. I’d probably add an intermediate column for the “mad newgrouper” phase of behaviour from people who, filled with enthusiasm and imagination for the potential of online collaboration want to keep on creating more and more online spaces without regard for the effect of dilution upon levels of interaction. But that doesn’t begin with a C.
German Edublogs November 14, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : pratodialogue, blogs and community, edublog , add a commentCan anybody recommend some German Blogs or Edublogs?
The reason why I’m asking is because I’m spending two weeks as a guest in a small course about educational design with a group of students based in Munich, although this part of the course is in English for some reason. I was invited by Patricia Arnold whom I met at the Prato Dialogue last month. So one of the things we are doing is to collect together some German blogs as way of both exploring the medium itself and that of self directed learning about the topic of Educational technology and design. Patricia has pointed to a favourite:
which thinks about the latest developments in e-learning used both in higher education and the corporate sector.
Update 1 :
Patricia suggested that having read “The Zen Art of Teaching” in English by Peter Baumgartner, 2004 his blog in German is worth a subscription.
Update 2:
Marion offers www.strukturnetz.de/blog/ about adult education and e-learning. The del.icio.us tagroll is appreciated.
In the Hotseat October 23, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : pratodialogue , add a comment(This is a continuation of my reflections after the Prato dialogue which I began in a previous post.)
Saturday concluded late in the evening with an informal demonstration by Etienne Wenger to the four of us occupying the upstairs appartment, of a useful little personal aide memoire program called “The Brain” (windows only) It displays information about people, organisations and documents using network diagrams, in way which is conducive to a connectivist and visual learning style. It was fun to discover that all of our names were already present in The Brain together with links to downloaded documents, in my case to my 2nd year paper about Introducing a Wiki to a Cop
I didn’t sleep well due to a pestering mosquito so I wasn’t quite with it in the morning, but needed to be aware of the time of my flight home. The suggested plans for the morning were still on the flipchart:
We decided there was just enough time to hold the hotseat right after breakfast, then walk to the river to see the “ponte vecchio” one of Europs’s last remaining inhabited bridges.
A ‘hotseat’ is really just a way of focussing a conversation on the experience of one guest while in the context of a host community. This had been mentioned by Derek the day before, as an alternative to the model of the expert addressing learners.
The practice seems to have been in use within Higher Education professional development for some years, and the structure can also be contrived in an online environment. We held many asynchronous hotseats during the time at Ultraversity, with some more useful than others, depending largely on the willingness of guest experts to engage with questioners and on the topic. One of the bones of contention was my suggestion that, rather than taking place outside of the learning communities in a separate “hotseat tool”, it would give the guest more context if they were invited into the usual platform for the period of the hotseat so I’m pleased that my first experience as a hotseat guest took place within an extended dialogue event which I was actively involved in.
Questions were asked to me (of those I recall) about the nature of the online degree course I recently completed, about the technology used to support learning communities, about Distributed Action Research, and about Barn raising for the development of Wikis. Remember this was a sitting around the table in real time type of hotseat, and so the only record is perhaps on Marc’s sound recorder. I don’t what happens to all of that audio but I wouldn’t want the job of trying to edit it into a useful form.
I found that I tended to use the questions as a starting point to try and tell stories which, I hope went some way towards answering and then went on to explain other ideas as they occured to me. Sometimes conversation would continue directly between others but then after a while, even without any formal chair, another question would be put to myself. The short time available went quickly for me, and we were still clarifying the idea of a COP convenor having the skill to identify a ’supersaturated solution’ type scenario as we walked down the grand staircase and out onto the streets to indulge in a short bout of sightseeing.
Reference sites:
Ultraversity Degree
Distributed Action Research
The Big Questions October 17, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : pratodialogue, distributed research, Wiki , add a commentHere’s an interesting process. A long list of “Big Questions” generated from the face-2-face CIRN conference at Prato has been placed on a wiki for anybody to get involved with contributing towards answering. Why not get in there and have a go at one or more of them?
In the morning session of the first conference day, participants were asked to write down the questions they would like to see answered, and stick their sheets of paper to the “Wall of Ideas”. On this wiki, each of the questions gets its own page. Please help to answer these questions by editing the page and add your bit of wisdom, excerpt, link, or anything else that might help in the weaving of our collective knowledge web.
A password is asked for prior to each edit, and the word is: prato2006. Please also include your name at the end of your contribution.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
