Collaboration - EDED20491 Week 2 Post #5

Engagement Activity 5: Optional Forum activity (for the duration of this course)

Finally, you may wish to engage in discussions (optional) with others about eLearning design - share ideas, pose questions, identify problems and issues you wish to talk through. If you read about, and understood, social constructivism, you will identify the value in working collaboratively, and of the perspectives of others. The discussion forum for these conversations is the eLearning Design Forum. In this way, you work with the entire FAHE11001 EDED20491 community. Alternatively, of course, you can work with others on an individual basis in their blogs. How do the two methods of collaboration compare? Which suits your learning preferences better? Do you think either a whole-group or an individual collaboration approach would suit for every single activity in the duration of this course? Would you select one or the other based on your learning requirements at any given time?

I would love to engage more with the other students in the forums within the GDLT but I am struggling to keep up with the readings and completing the engagement activities every week. I think one of the problems that I have with the way that the forums are set up is that ALL 100 students are writing to them and I get overwhelmed every time I log onto my email and/or enter the forums. There is so much to read and I don't know where to begin and feel reluctant to comment knowing that each post send out 100+ emails to other people in the class. On reflection I wonder if it would be better to break us into tutorial-size groups (~ 20 people) for some of the forum activities. That way I would get to know the ideas and engage with the train of thought of 19 other people. To me that would be much more manageable.

Of course some forums need the whole class to be enrolled in them. But if you want to encourage the students to really engage with others I personally would like to work in groups of 20 people or less.

One way I have implemented that type of engagement with my blog was the idea of having Blog Buddies.

Post Script:
A book I read recently that discussed was Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In it he discusses the power of groups and how the formation and use of groups has changed as a result of the Internet. He discusses the power of groups in Education.

Debbie Morrison's blog about Open and Online Education online learning insights has recently posted about Clay Shirky and Online Education and discussed it in the context of Higher Education.