I think it is good for MET students to try different platforms. We can use that experience to make educated decisions when trying out LMS for our students (if we are educators and we so chose to). What platform did we like? What lay-out or organizational plan would I want for my students? Do I […]
Continue reading Participation Portfolio Posted in: General
While I see some of the points made by other students regarding the Blog vs traditional LMS to facilitate this course. I myself liked the fact that this information would be live to the Internet. With this knowledge, I had to ensure a more respectful tone (not that we weren’t), but more so, considering at […]
Continue reading Participation Portfolio – Resource Depot Posted in: General
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teacherben 11:47 pm on November 29, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think the same thing could have been accomplished using a discussion forum that was publicly visible (although I would say that the thought of my colleagues in this class, all professionals and working at a master’s level, seeing my work was more than enough of a motivator to try to write something intelligent. My personal opinion is that a blog is best used when you have one primary author and a multitude of commenters. The discussion is guided by that primary individual. With so many authors, it is difficult to keep track of new, interesting posts, or to se who responded to the question that you asked here or there. I definitely prefer being able to open up a forum and see how many ‘unread’ comments I have. I am sure that I missed all sorts of good stuff in this course because of this. People are more likely to check the ‘recent posts’ or ‘recent comments’ and respond to something that interests them in there. If, for example, you happen to be in the same time zone as the majority of people, then you are more likely to get a response and generate a real discussion since more people will see it while it is up. For those that aren’t, their ideas may be buried quickly and by the time they get back 12 or 24 hours later, the discussion has long since moved on. (Either that or my comments were just boring…) Subscribing to a feed was one way to do it, but it’s not so simple to click from there into the wordpress to respond to a comment. So while I believe that there was no shortage of good discussion in this course, I would not recommend a blog for the next time around. (Incidentally, it seems that this was on a wiki sometime in the past, so it is cool to see the David’s experimenting with formats and technologies.)
tomwhyte1 6:03 am on November 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I am not disagreeing about the intelligence of the community of learners, that was not my thoughts or intentions. However, in many of closed off courses, sometimes discussions are not course related, and yes I realize there is a section for those in those courses, however it was rarely used. I was just getting at the fact that the completely open environment, ensures that we are not only intelligent in our responses, but our cognitive dissonance, which will and should occur regularly, regarding at times, real life products, not only keeps us disagreeing agreeably, but aware that we are discussing real life products and the time and effort multiple people have put forth. Do I like other LMS’s, yes. I have used Blogs, Connect and Vista – and in my mind Vista provides the most services to assist conversations, in that it shows where new conversations have occurred and if any have been directed at you. Both of which are essential, and have missed dearly in this course.
And I am glad to hear that experimentation on delivery happens. For no matter what system you provide, some people will be happy, while others less so. And you never know, with experimentation may one day come my much wanted Resource Depot.
Thoughts?
visramn 10:15 am on November 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think that is a good idea. I think for a course at this level, individuals would use such a tool as a resource to help them to concretize and further their understandings not as means of plagiarism. I am a visual person and find that seeing an artifact teaches me a lot more than reading about that same artifact or the components of that artifact. This type of resource would be helpful to individuals who have no prior background in business and would give them more confidence in their ability to create a potent and plausible venture.
Nureen
Peggy Lawson 9:42 am on December 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I’ll just add to your comments, Tom, regarding the quality (stay-on-topicness) of discussion threads when open to the public vs in a closed LMS. I’ll respectfully disagree. Now in my 9th MET class, I’ve generally found my classmates to be very focused on the topics, always respectful, and very meaningful and rich. There was the odd brief off-topic comment, but those more often than not added to the spontenaity and group-building of the course. As mentioned several times now, in numerous threads, I think the combination of a large class size and the nature of blogs vs discussion boards (Ben explained it well) made it much more difficult to create rich discussions in this course. Rare were the real conversations between more than 2, occassionally 3, people at a time as a reall back-and-forth discussion. Unfortunately I felt very little of the collegial bonding of classmates in this course that I’ve come to greatly appreciate in MET and perhaps the public blog forum was a major reason for that.