Author Archives: cindyu

A bit about designing for open…

Some great discussion during the Open Pedagogy webinar earlier today about learning, design (pedagogy) and open. As soon as we have a link to the archive, we’ll post it on our Week 1 schedule.

I thought this would be a good time to add to the discussion about designing open learning environments. If you managed to make it through the slideshow on this topic – bravo! If not, here’s a bit of an overview of the key ideas.

You are designing a web, not a website.

Stephen Downes, in his description of design elements in a personal learning environment, reminds us that a MOOC (for example) is a web not a website. This statement really resonates with me when I consider that the main focus in our work in developing this site (and other connectivist online learning spaces) focuses on the question “what can we do to support both the connections between participants and the sharing of what we are learning with one another?” And this is no easy task! The most challenging aspect is the careful consideration of the details that go into those interactions so that we can choose the approaches and technologies that best support them.

Here are some of Downes’ key considerations and our additions. Click to enlarge the images.

The concept of uncoverage is really just another perspective on inquiry – Mark Sample wrote a good piece about it in the Chronicle a couple of years ago: Teaching for Uncoverage Rather Than Coverage. And, while assessment for understanding may seem obvious, McTighe and Seif – explain why they think it is important to put understanding back into focus in our teaching and learning environments: Teaching for Understanding.

In thinking about your own context, is this a useful framework for thinking about the design of an open, online course? Are there other considerations that you would consider important?

Week 1: Launching TWP15!

Welcome to Teaching with WordPress! We are a small, but mighty group for our first run at this and we’re looking forward to learning with you! Here are a few things that we think you might find helpful:

Collaborative learning and lasting connections

This is an open, online course for anyone who wants to connect and share ideas about teaching and learning with WordPress, in any context. Whether you have no experience teaching with WordPress or quite a bit, we all have something to contribute and can all learn from each other.

Indeed, we expect that you will get as much or more out of your interactions with other participants than you do from what we have provided through the readings, videos and other resources. And we hope that your connections and discussions with other participants will last beyond the official end of the course. Ideally you would finish the course with a few people to add to your own learning network!

Find your own path through the course

For each week we have provided suggested readings and activities, but we would like to stress that you should feel free to read, discuss and do what you find most useful, even if it’s very different from what we have suggested. In fact, please contribute links to resources that you find useful, informative or provocative. You can share them in our Resources section.Focus on your learning goals and do what you need to fulfill them, and invite others to discuss and collaborate with you. We encourage you, therefore, to raise your own questions or topics for discussion on your blog posts and on Twitter if you feel that would be useful. Others might find it useful too!

Get help

We have put together a bit of a guide to help with setting up a blog on WordPress, with using Twitter if you’re new to it and want to start, and with creating videos (which you may want to do later in the course).

Check out the blog hub

We have set up a blog hub with all the posts participants are writing relevant to the course. We suggest you read through a few posts each week and comment on them! If you have an RSS reader, you can add all the posts from the blog hub to it just by adding our feed URL: https://blogs.ubc.ca/teachwordpress/category/blog-hub/feed/

More feeds…
You can keep up on the activity in the course, by adding any one of the course feeds to your reader. You’ll find them on the lower right column.

And if you don’t know what an RSS feed or reader are, and you want to, why, just ask, whether on Twitter (#TWP15) or on a comment on one of the “weeklies” (discussion pages), or reply back to this email!

Tweet with #TWP15

If you have a Twitter account and want to join us on Twitter, our course hashtag is #TWP15. We hope you’ll tweet at least one “big question” each week to engage all of us (including your own networks) in what your grappling with.

What’s Up in Week 1?

Join us for our kick-off webinar! Monday, June 1, 12:00-13:00 Pacific/ 15:00-16:00 Eastern/ 19:00-20:00 UTC. Amanda Coolidge, Mary Burgess and Tracy Kelly from BCcampus in Canada (http://bccampus.ca) will help us think through what open pedagogy is/isn’t and what it might look like in practice. See the week 1 schedule for a link to join when the session starts and for details about suggested readings, resources, and activities for the week as we focus on Open Pedagogy and Design.

Potentially Coherent

What do you think of the concept of a learning wrapper for video? Does this implementation in WP seem feasible?

Learning Wrapper for Video

Learning wrappers take many forms (exam wrappers, homework wrappers, metacognitive wrappers). Their purpose is generally to provide learners with framework for reflection on their learning: what did they learn, what confusions surfaced and what do they need to explore further, change or seek clarification on as a result of what they learned? The use of […]

Learning Wrapper for Video

What Is Connectivism?

George Siemens, is an educator and theorist in the field of digital learning and is the author of the article “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age” and the book “Knowing Knowledge“. He provides an overview of connectivism in this short interview for the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia.

More on Connectivism:
Stephen Downes: Connectivism as a Learning Theory.

Design Question

We could use this page as the default for posts (weekly). Add category pages for feeds from blogs related to weekly themes? (users categorize their posts with category for the week and we pull in via feed shortcode?). Challenge: all posts for assignment bank will show here as well. Any work arounds?

Fishbone Collaboration

Fishbone diagram

Fishbone diagrams (sometimes called Ishikawa diagrams) are often used in analysis of problems for cause and effect relationships. The basic structure, however, is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of uses. Effects (or problems) may be re-cast as goals and causes as contributers or enablers to achieving goals.

Riffing off an activity that was designed by D’Arcy Norman (U of Calgary) and posted online, we’re asking you to invite collaborators to create a fishbone diagram to think about a teaching challenge or goal that is meaningful to you.

Your challenge

Create a fishbone diagram that addresses a teaching goal (like improving engagement, for example). You can frame this as a problem or challenge if you like (students are not engaged, as an example). You may:

consider main spines or bones as major components of the learning environment: content creation, assessment, learner interactions. You may choose others.
add/ brainstorm as many elements in each of those components as you can think of
draw a line through any you have no control over.

You will need:

an online collaborative drawing tool like Flockdraw or Twiddla
people to collaborate with online

Share your experience:

In the comments below, share the link to your fishbone diagram when you have done as much as you can – along with your collective feedback about the process.
OR post about it on your WordPress site and tag your post with collaboration and whiteboard to have it appear with this post (at least we think that’s what will happen?)

Would you use this with your students? How?

Intended learning outcome:

Collaborative problem analysis for cause/effect relationships.