WK8 - Final Week - course wrap up & reflection

Task Discussion

• 
  Jennifer Claro   Aug. 22, 2011, 6:07 p.m.

  Hi Everyone!

  How's it going? I made a post over a week ago at my blog about our Intro to CSCL course but forgot to post a link here. Here it is:

  http://jenniferclaro.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/peer-to-peer-learning-at-p2pu/

  It's so cool that our entire course stays online even months after we finished it! I'm coming back here now to pick up articles I didn't have time to read before, and to re-read interesting posts.

  Thanks again to everyone for such a great course, and especially to Monica and Stian! I heard from Stian that he and Monica will be facilitating a book club on Vygotsky in the fall. Hope to see you there!

  Cheers,

  Jennifer

• 
  Stian Haklev   July 20, 2011, 9:32 a.m.

  Hey guys,

  I gave a talk at an international conference in Northern China, talking a lot about this class and many ideas I got from it, and some of the future research I am thinking about. Watch it (both slides and audio). Would love your feedback. We are also planning to present about the course at AERA next year (the proposal is due in two days). 

  I have also been sharing this course with many at the CSCL conference. Gerry Stahl said he went to visit the course, but he found it quite hard to navigate. Are anyone up for a little "barn-raising" with sorting through all the content we've generated and trying to create maybe one nice page (on the wiki or somewhere else), with all the formal readings, the most important blog posts and other contributions, Etherpads etc all linked from the same place? I think that would be really helpful to future groups (and even for ourselves, referring back to this course in the future).

• 
  Stian Haklev   June 20, 2011, 8:25 a.m.

  Martin posted his answers to the questions on his blog.

• 
  Jennifer Claro   June 19, 2011, 4:44 p.m.

  Hi Everyone,

  The manifesto in its current state is at http://pad.p2pu.org/cscl7 (thanks Joe!) so if you want to change anything before I send it out, please do so by Monday evening. Or just send me a message if you need longer.

  Also please send me your physical mailing address by e-mail if you want a copy signed by everyone who made it.

  Cheers,

  Jennifer

• 
  Jennifer Claro   June 19, 2011, 4:26 a.m.

  Hi Everyone,

  Thanks for a great last chat, I will miss our chats, and all of you! 

  Please send me your name and address by e-mail (internal here at P2PU or external to my Yahoo account)  if you'd like to sign the manifesto. I'm going to print out copies tomorrow and send them around to everyone who wants to sign them. That way we'll each get our own signed copy :) I'll also include a photo of me (I'd suggest we all do that :) for each person and possibly some yummy Japanese rice crackers.

  So if anyone wants to make any final changes to the manifesto could you please do it by say Monday evening Toronto time? I'll wait till Tuesday (Japan time) to print and send it. 

  Hey, by the way, where is it now? Does someone have it or is it on last week's PiratePad? Please let me know.

  Cheers,

  Jennifer

• 
  Joe Corneli   June 21, 2011, 6:17 a.m.
  In Reply To:   Jennifer Claro   June 19, 2011, 4:26 a.m.

  I put a copy on Wikiversity at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Arided/FreeLearningManifesto -- it could be signed virtually there (I have).

• 
  Jennifer Claro   June 21, 2011, 3:53 p.m.
  In Reply To:   Joe Corneli   June 21, 2011, 6:17 a.m.

  Cool, Joe! It looks great! For some reason, the link in the e-mail I got didn't work, but the link in the message at P2PU worked.

  Thanks for posting it. 

  Jennifer

• 
  Marcy Murninghan   June 18, 2011, 5 p.m.

  Hi, everyone,

  I was at a conference at Yale from Wednesday morning through late last night, so haven't been able to respond to the questions. I will, though, very shortly. I'll also post a blog.

  Key for me in this course:

  • Content was king, very juicy, bottomless topics that could have warranted more time
  • Participants -- you guys -- are so damn smart! I wish I could have spent more time getting to know each one, what your aspirations are, and learning more from you
  • Weekly prompts were very helpful. Something to include from Day One, methinks.
  • Better categories for who we are: as a practitioner / scholar, I'm in the "applied" world, and appreciate (a) time limits for this kind of commitment, which often get in the way of fuller / better participation; and (b) the need for capturing direct impact implications. This means contextualizing our learning goals, and maybe a buddy system
  • Would love to continue in some fashion, as there's no question that this is the frontier of learning and teaching and facilitating--particularly in professional development / public / work environments.

  See you online!!!

   

  And hug to you all!  {{{{{{{{{{{P2PU CSCL}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

   

  Marcy.

• 
  Nate Otto   June 18, 2011, 11:34 a.m.

  - What was the best thing about this course?

  I thought the level of excitement our core participants had for exploring this material and learning together was envigorating.

  - Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?

  I feel the things I learned here will help me in life more than my current job, where formal learning isn't emphasized. We all learn things together and from eachother informally on how to make the business run smoothly, and I may be able to apply techniques of group learning to how I do that.

  - Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week?

  3-5 hours, most of it reading, some writing, and 1 hour of meeting. I'm glad I only missed one meeting, because the sessions were very exciting.
  
  - How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?

  I think we may have lost some speed as we frequently renegotiated how the course was going to work. Sometimes this was very fruitful (I felt switching to Etherpad meetings, then Etherpad + Skype diads was great, for example), but other times I wished we could have spent more of our limited time talking about the course content. I think if we were going to try badges, it would have been nice to have them set up before the class began.
  
  - How could the different tools and communication channels work better?

  Netvibes page: good and useful overview, brought #csclintro and blogs together.
  The email notifications of new comments posted on this site were where I did most of my reading. (If only the system were as smart as Facebook in allowing replies to notification emails to get routed back as replies to a very specific comment and we could do even more of the course by email).
  The Bi-Weekly was very useful. I forget who mentioned how spread out the conversations were across blogs and everywhere, but as I thought the distribution of conversation was a good thing (it's fun to get a comment on your own space!), I felt the Bi-Weekly was a good way of bringing it back together with links.
  A technical issue: I think this site would work better with a lighter weight mobile version of the page so I could better reply on breaks from work.

  
   

  Thanks all for your energy and inspiration. I'll hopefully see you at 5pm EDT.

• 
  Joe Corneli   June 18, 2011, 7:28 a.m.

   

  WHAT WAS THE BEST THING ABOUT THIS COURSE?

   

  The best thing for me was to see how well a mixed-modality

  course can work on P2PU -- by combining formal education

  aspects, some degree of co-location, distance education,

  and informal learning.  The result was a course with great

  sustained participation, good networking for the future as well.

   

  But I think this ties for "bestness" with the selection of

  readings, which was excellent.  Another proof of concept:

  "survey courses" are likely to be a good use of time for

  grad-student types in other fields.

   

  DID YOU LEARN ANYTHING THAT WILL HELP YOU IN YOUR JOB OR STUDIES?

   

  Already has helped: I cited Scardamalia in the final set

  of revisions for my "paragogy" paper.  Furthermore, 1-1

  discussions with Jennifer adjacent to this course gave me

  a lot of ideas about participation, and helped me find

  another cool reference, "Authority is Relational" by

  Charles Bingham.  Much appreciated.  I'm also

  incorporating the ideas about "multi-stars" into a paper.

   

  APPROXIMATELY HOW MUCH TIME DID YOU SPEND ON THE COURSE EACH WEEK?

   

  I guess it was approximately equal in-class and

  out-of-class, so 2-3 hours per week on average?

   

  HOW SHOULD WE IMPROVE THE ORGANIZATION OF THE COURSE IN THE FUTURE?

   

  It is often impossible for me to distinguish between

  course-specific issues and platform issues.  I've

  offered to Monica to have a paragogical post mortem

  discussion with her and any others who want to participate

  in that.  A sketch of thoughts along these lines from me:

   

  1. Changing context as a decentered center.

   

  Course-wide and site-wide tags would help people have

  important "meta-discussions" while allowing others to

  filter them away if desired. 

   

  2. Meta-learning as a font of knowledge.

   

  Since this is a course on CSCL, and we're also doing CSCL

  in the course, we're in a very good position to do

  meta-learning.  I think more of an "applied" track would

  have been nice to add in addition to the "survey" track (I

  would have certainly freed up more time for this!).

   

  3. Peers provide feedback that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

   

  I found my 1-1 conversations with Jennifer to be of equal

  interest and importance to the conversations in the

  course.  We were talking about challenging emotional

  aspects of participation in this course and P2PU more

  generally.  I think this sort of "peer support" dimension

  is great, not sure how to improve it (!), but we certainly

  did come up with some ideas about how to improve emotional

  aspects of peer learning in this kind of space.

   

  Ultimately I am not happy about the way feedback and ideas

  are currently handled at P2PU in the large: it doesn't yet

  seem to be peer-governed, and I find that very

  disappointing.  The course has been better in this regard.

   

  4. Learning is distributed and nonlinear.

   

  Like Stian, I've had a number of overlapping projects

  (including the "Shaping P2PU" course I've been trying to

  organize), and, as in item 1, I think more explicit

  technological support for distributed and non-linear

  thinking would be good.

   

  5. Realize the dream if you can, then wake up

   

  The course was great as a survey course.  This aspect

  might be improved if the citation management system had

  been set up and was working better from the start.  (Stian

  and I talked briefly about citation management 1-1...)

  However, as I mentioned above, I think more work with

  applications is the logical "next step".

   

  HOW COULD THE DIFFERENT TOOLS AND COMMUNICATION CHANNELS WORK BETTER?

   

  See above: tags, citation management issues, "political"

  issues around P2PU.  It also would have been nice to be

  able to reply to system emails directly from my email

  client instead of having to use the website.

   

  I personally got nothing from the "followers", and I

  question that mode of (non-)engagement.  Did *they* get

  anything out of the course (I wonder)?  I assume some of

  them are cool people, but if this aspect of the system is

  going to be "useful", it needs some re-thinking.
• 
  Stian Haklev   June 18, 2011, 8:03 a.m.
  In Reply To:   Joe Corneli   June 18, 2011, 7:28 a.m.

  Hey Joe, 

  thanks a lot for your comments. 

  Some interesting points you raise. I agree that having a better social support system would be great, and we can also get a lot out of individual contact - sometimes conversations flow so much more naturally between two people. This was part of the idea of having the small Skype meetings (and hopefully people could then get to know each other a little bit better, and take initiative to discuss more outside of "class"). I've also really appreciated some of the discussions I've had with Monica. Would love your ideas on how we could "bake this" more into the course.

  I'm also concerned about the platform. The full e-mail integration is a funny one. I was arguing loudly for that almost a year ago, then it seemed like it was too hard to do in the old platform. However, it doesn't seem to have been prioritized in the new platform either. I really hope they can get that going soon. In general, I feel that there isn't enough focus on enabling deep engaging discussions at P2PU - I've seen so many other platforms that are really built for that, and the P2PU discussion function still seems like a bit of an after thought - it's great for quick updates, links and ideas, but not really suited for in-depth discussions or "knowledge building"... 

  I'm also curious about followers - we are planning to distribute a questionnaire to them. Initially I was hoping to have something of a combination between a MOOC and a smaller course, since I think both models have advantages, but as you know, nothing of that sort happened. Part of me thinks that the MOOC model to a certain extent hinges on very well-known people, which is a problem for the model. However, perhaps the fact that we made the modes of participation different was also a factor - if it was only a MOOC, it might have been different - I don't know. (Also, there are some technical features lacking for followers - initially they didn't even get our announcement posts, and they still cannot get all the email updates, which I thought was the whole point of the function... although the RSS feed is open to everyone). 

  I'm not too worried about it - having the functionality doesn't take anything away from the course or put any burden on the course organizer. But I would love to think about how to make it more useful. 

  I would certainly be interested in a debriefing, let's discuss what you have in mind!

  One thing that continually interested me in this course was how the formal design of the course influenced what people did... In comparison to a normal university course, once the course started, Monica and I had barely any more formal power than anyone else... I think the only technical functionality I have which is unique, apart from admitting people etc, is to force updates to everyone. But I'd be happy to announce on other's behalf... And there are no grades, and no way for me to give people sticks or carrots, no grades, etc. No way of compelling behaviour...

  And yet, of course, the course happened mostly as we had planned. Not entirely, the badges didn't happen, and we did try to listen to suggestions etc. But my point is, somebody could have created some OER, and nobody ended up doing that (if you look away from all of the artefacts created in the process of learning, like blog posts etc, which I believe are very valuable). Someone could have initiated a more "practical track", and nobody did, etc :)

  This is something I still need to think more about, and something I think has not been discussed much in the literature.

• 
  Joe Corneli   June 18, 2011, 8:17 a.m.
  In Reply To:   Stian Haklev   June 18, 2011, 8:03 a.m.

  Cool, I guess we'll talk more about these things soon - but quick note in response to the "somebody could have but nobody did" items: actually, I did organize Shaping P2PU (even before this course started), and it would be a great place to do applied work.  The course tasks are based on a publication-quality paper that we're re-publishing as CCZero on paragogy.net. However, the group itself has languished.  My current thought (which I think is a very constructive and somewhat clever solution!) is to have Shaping P2PU become an aggregator for a certain set of tags that will show up in courses (like this one).  The thing is, this technological solution needs work (likely by more than just one person), and the political aspects need work too.  So, I don't think it's "someone could have, no one did", but rather "we need to do this, and some of us have gotten started."

  So far these things are just moving slowly.

• 
  Stian Haklev   June 18, 2011, 8:19 a.m.
  In Reply To:   Joe Corneli   June 18, 2011, 8:17 a.m.

  Absolutely. I think your idea of tags and points etc are all interesting. I think the reason I was quite disinvolved in that particular discussion in this course, was because I felt that these features would not be available to us by the time the course ended. However in a longer perspective I'm certainly interested in discussing them.

  Stian

• 
  Stian Haklev   June 18, 2011, 1:36 a.m.

  Ok, so I'll try my hand at these questions too. As I mentioned previously, I'll probably have a lot more to say about this, and I hope to do some serious thinking about how the course went, what could be improved etc, but I want to get something out before the end of the week (and I'd love to hear from the others in this group as well).

  What was the best thing about this course?

  Wow, hard to say. One of the fascinating things for me was that even though I have been very intimately involved with P2PU since the very beginning, and supported a lot of course organizers etc, I really got a new perspective on P2PU courses through facilitating one for the first time. This was a bit of a surprise for me. I guess there are different perspectives - when you are trying to coordinate 60+ courses, you think of which features that many people will need, how you can provide support for it, etc, whereas when you are the course organizer of one course, you are fiercely protective of it, and you become very focused on what your course needs.

  Apart from that, I think the amazing contributions from everyone was just stunning. Without blaming anyone, because I know we are all busy, I would often have liked to see a bit more participation. But the participation that did happen was pretty universally excellent - every single participant wrote blog posts and forum posts that were deep, creative, surprising, and gave me lot's of new ideas, even about topics that I've studied in class for a long time. 

  Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?

  Absolutely. Basically, my studies are CSCL, and I really want to not only access the literature relevant to my specific research project (which is still being defined), but also have a broad overview of the literature -- hopefully I'll be teaching courses on CSCL and supervising students etc in the future. It's hard to separate out the course from everything else I was doing these 8 weeks, I was also reading a bunch of articles that were not part of the course etc. But there is no dobut that the course motivated me to do more in-depth readings of some key concepts, and the discussions were really enlightening, often bringing up points that I had never thought of before. A great example is the first two weeks - dealing with things like constructivism and Communities of Practice which I think many think are "introductory" - we "all know what that is", now let's move on to the advanced stuff. Yet, we had some great discussions, and I gained a much better understanding of the different aspects of constructivism, etc. 

  As Monica said, we are also interested in ways of researching P2PU and other open courses, so in that sense, the course might have had an even more direct impact. While we didn't start this course with a specific research design, we have certainly learnt a huge amount as a "baseline", and also identified a number of issues that we had not thought about previously. We might also do some post-analysis of some of the public artefacts that were generated (we'll let you know if we produce anything).
  
  Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week?
  Really hard to answer, both because it varied so much, but also because a lot of it kind of became enmeshed with my general study of CSCL. For two weeks in the beginning I was "out of the loop" because of travelling, and problems with my eye. After that, I've spent quite a lot of time on the articles etc, but to me, the course didn't seem like an added burden, because this was mostly stuff I would have wanted to do anyway for my general studies.

  Of course, facilitating did also take quite a bit of time. There was a ton of prep-work involved, which hopfully will also be useful to others in the future, who want to build a course on our "foundations", and also some work during the course with bi-weeklies, etc. It was really helpful to have a co-organizer, but it would be great to try to spread some of this responsibility in future courses.

  How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?
  As Monica said, this is something that I need to think a lot more about - but it's REALLY helpful for Monica and me to hear what you all think! Some of the issues that came up during the course about how democratic we should be, how much time we should spend on meta-discussions as opposed to focusing on readings, etc, were quite surprising to me, and is something I definitively want to do more thinking around! 

  I still want to try to do a course with badges, but I'll make sure to have everything ready by the time the course starts - and I think once the badges are better integrated with the main P2PU platform, that will also make it easier. (I actually think we are also migrating platforms this weekend, so from new.p2pu.org we are going to be just p2pu.org! :))

  How could the different tools and communication channels work better?

  Even though there are many things that have been improved from the old P2PU platform, I feel like there is still a lot of work to be done. It would be great to have something like the Netvibes functionality built in, but I was very glad that we had that platform. Blogging worked well, although a problem is always that comments might be overlooked - you might read a blog entry early on, and not realize that there is a really active discussion happening in the comments field later during that week. 

  The forum pages have improved since we started the course, but there are still improvements needed. I think an individual "unread" count on each task would be one big improvement. 

  Our experiments with Etherpad, especially the last one with so many "threaded" discussions, as well as the use of Skype, was quite successful. I would love to see a chat platform explicitly built to allow this kind of threaded discussions. There is lots of work that could be done in this area. 

  Thanks to all participants!

  Stian

• 
  Monica Resendes   June 17, 2011, 11:44 p.m.

  - What was the best thing about this course?

  A couple of things. First off having a platform to discuss readings and issues in supportive and stimulating environment with supportive and stimulating people! Also, I really enjoyed our weekly meetings. Each week was so different, but great for different reasons.

  
  - Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?

  Being a facilitator/participant was very useful for my studies as it gave me a new perspective on collaborative educational platforms - moving from studying them and how others use them to how I and my peers have used this platfrom (by which I mean P2P + blogs, tweets, etc) to learn together. I also acquired a bunch of incredibly useful articles that I've already integrated into presentations and papers. So, yes, I did gain very valuable resources that have already proven to help me greatly.
  
  - Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week? I can't remember - things got a little hairy for me near the last 2 weeks, but I spent quite a bit of time, especially near the beginning. Not sure how much though. I also spent time doing some "facilitator" stuff, so time spent would probably have been less if I didn't do things like write bi-weeklies or discussion questions.
  
  - How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?

  Okay - this is a question I feel I couldn't answer briefly at the moment. I certainly want to spend more time thinking about this and will perhaps blog about at some point. So, I'll link to those once they get written.
  
  - How could the different tools and communication channels work better?

  Hmm. The netvibes page was essential - i thought that was a great addition by Stian. I found it very useful for pooling tweets and blogs together. I actually found the various forum discussions useful but a bit messy - with so many "task" pages and different conversations going on, it's hard to get an overview of what was said and group ideas together (I think size of comments/posts have something to do with this - each comment, even if its relatively short, takes up quite a bit of screen real estate, so there's alot of scrolling going on.) I think it'd be interesting to see how to incorporate people's blogs comments more centrally into the general discussions - there were alot of really great discussions going on in comment threads on individual blogs, but I'm not so sure how often those ideas got reigned into the discussions going on on the forum or even in meetings. It would've been fun to try out more options with the weekly meetings (group etherpad, small skype meetings) but I do think what we did do worked very well.

• 
  Jennifer Claro   June 18, 2011, 4:29 p.m.
  In Reply To:   Monica Resendes   June 17, 2011, 11:44 p.m.

  I posted this a couple days ago but it seems to have vanished... Here it is again! :) Stian, your reply to me also seems to have vanished. Could you post it again please? I want to reply to it. I really liked what you wrote about theory, I love theory and I'm just getting my feet wet in CSCL theory. It's very interesting! 

   

  What was the best thing about this course? The people! The discussions. The new insights on several topics. The facilitators. The manifesto!! :) The weekly chats, they were what really brought us together as a group.

  - Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?

Hmmm, not directly but Monica sent me a thesis that will likely be a primary resource in planning my own dissertation. Thanks again Monica!

  - Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week?

I spent all of my free time on the course, but how much free time I had varied a lot. The problem is that I had a wiki project going on with my 2^nd year students that required a lot of planning and then I had a presentation on that as well, and that sucked up about 3 weeks of my time. I also got stuck on the badge issue (what the heck did we decide anyway? Is it still up in the air?) and lost a lot of time to that, instead of being more productive on reading, writing, contributing.

  - How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?

I think the course was very well organized and can’t think how it could be improved. Monica and Stian both did a great job and I’m really glad I took this course. I’m sad it’s ending! So many readings I didn’t get to yet as well… Well, I will get to them, thanks to both of you for choosing a great bunch of articles.

  - How could the different tools and communication channels work better?

It’s weird, our chats were kind of crazy, so many people talking at the same time, 2 or 3 threads, trying to read everything but still stay on track, but I really liked it! The alternative is listening to one person speak, similar to f2f style, or chatting with one other person. Chatting with one other person is kind of hit-and-miss, you may or may not find something great to discuss. But with the many-conversations-going-on-at-the-same-time (MCGOATST) idea, you could just hop into whichever one was most appealing at the time. Honestly I think that with a small enough group, a group chat is better than breaking up. In fact, I think it was the best part of the course for me. The chats, the jokes, the spontaneous nature of them, they were so fun! They were the social part of the course, and we all know how social interaction is the glue of online courses. We also found similar interests thru those chats so later discussions and blog posts had some kind of foundation.

  I’m planning to write a blog post on my great experience at P2PU but it may take a while (hopefully can do by Monday) and I wanted to be sure to answer your questions this week.

  I want to thank Monica and Stian sincerely for setting up a great course and for your great contributions to the course. I hope you both will facilitate more courses at P2PU, together or separately, and I will likely take more courses here. And I’ll highly recommend P2PU as well. Really, it was a great experience.

  By the way, I think a CSCL book club would be a great idea, and I’d volunteer to help, altho I don’t have time to facilitate or co-facilitate. I have a course from July 4 to mid-August so I won’t be able to contribute much at that time. But before and after, I’m in.

  Thanks again to my great peers, who made this course a pleasure. I hope to see many of you in the book club! 

• 
  Stian Haklev   June 18, 2011, 4:57 p.m.
  In Reply To:   Jennifer Claro   June 18, 2011, 4:29 p.m.

  Hi Jennifer, 

  it's still here! If you click next on the bottom of the page. The threading of replies is kind of confusing - as I said, these discussion forums need a lot of work, a far cry from Knowledge eCommons which we used in Clare's class (which I think also has a lot of potential for improvement as a knowledge building / CSCL tool, but at least works very solidly as a discussion forum). 

   

  Stian

• 
  Jennifer Claro   June 17, 2011, 8:48 p.m.

  Hello Everyone,

  Sorry, I'd like to ask your help in locating a post by Monica on Knowledge Building. It was kind of like a synthesis of what she thinks about KB and its limits...?? It started off by saying that she had some experience in KB and then went into KB and later on its limits. I can't find it anywhere! I've looked on her blog and in here at P2PU too and on Google. And she doesn't know where it is either! 

  I'd really appreciate it if anyone could send me the link to that post. 

  Thanks,

  Jennifer

  P.S. - Hey Monica, do you have a copy of it? I usually write in Word first and then copy and paste... might you have it stored in a document?

• 
  Monica Resendes   June 14, 2011, 10:45 a.m.

  RELFECTION QUESTIONS

  
  - What was the best thing about this course?
  
  - Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?
  
  - Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week?
  
  - How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?
  
  - How could the different tools and communication channels work better?

• 
  Stian Haklev   June 14, 2011, 11:10 a.m.
  In Reply To:   Monica Resendes   June 14, 2011, 10:45 a.m.

  Hey everyone. thank you for an amazing course so far. I know people are tired, but me and Monica would really appreciate if you found some time this week for a final reflection. This is a great time for you to go through what we've done in the previous weeks, think about what was the most interesting (or challenging to you), how you want to take this further etc... But don't get over-ambitious - the material is not going anywhere! So don't postpone your blog post because you get overwhelmed. We'd still really like to hear from you this week!

  We posted some guiding questions above, feel free to let them guide you, but also add anything else you want.

  This is also a great chance to look at what we have produced so far, and whether we can make any of it more available ot others - post to wikis, etc. One thing we definitively want to do (and would love some help) is to try to compile the weekly updates, both the planned readings and all the resources that were added in the discussion, links to blog posts etc to one big document for others who are interested in this topic, so they won't have to hunt around through our entire course. That'll be a kind of "OER" in itself.

  Feel free also to discuss ways you want to bring this community, course, topic, network, friendships forward. We are not planning for any new readings this week, and you'll have the entire Saturday chat to discuss this. Do we want to create a "CSCL book club"? Would any of you be interested in running this course again in the future (with lot's of support)? Are there other ways in which we can keep our community going?

  (We are not planning to shut down this course space, so you can keep posting here, messaging each other etc. However, the formal course ends at the end of the week, and we want to honour people's committment to that time frame).

  Thanks again for a great experience.

  Stian

• 
  Jennifer Claro   June 17, 2011, 7:48 a.m.
  In Reply To:   Monica Resendes   June 14, 2011, 10:45 a.m.

   

  What was the best thing about this course? The people! The discussions. The new insights on several topics. The facilitators. The manifesto!! JThe weekly chats, they were what really brought us together as a group.

  Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?

 Hmmm, not directly but Monica sent me a thesis that will likely be a primary resource in planning my own dissertation. Thanks again Monica!

  Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week? 

I spent all of my free time on the course, but how much free time I had varied a lot. The problem is that I had a wiki project going on with my 2^nd year students that required a lot of planning and then I had a presentation on that as well, and that sucked up about 3 weeks of my time. I also got stuck on the badge issue (what the heck did we decide anyway? Is it still up in the air?) and lost a lot of time to that, instead of being more productive on reading, writing, contributing.

  How should we improve the organization of the course in the future? 

I think the course was very well organized and can’t think how it could be improved. Monica and Stian both did a great job and I’m really glad I took this course. I’m sad it’s ending! So many readings I didn’t get to yet as well… Well, I will get to them, thanks to both of you for choosing a great bunch of articles.

  How could the different tools and communication channels work better? 

It’s weird, our chats were kind of crazy, so many people talking at the same time, 2 or 3 threads, trying to read everything but still stay on track, but I really liked it! The alternative is listening to one person speak, similar to f2f style, or chatting with one other person. Chatting with one other person is kind of hit-and-miss, you may or may not find something great to discuss. But with the many-conversations-going-on-at-the-same-time (MCGOATST) idea, you could just hop into whichever one was most appealing at the time. Honestly I think that with a small enough group, a group chat is better than breaking up. In fact, I think it was the best part of the course for me. The chats, the jokes, the spontaneous nature of them, they were so fun! They were the social part of the course, and we all know how social interaction is the glue of online courses. We also found similar interests thru those chats so later discussions and blog posts had some kind of foundation.

  I’m planning to write a blog post on my great experience at P2PU but it may take a while (hopefully can do by Monday) and I wanted to be sure to answer your questions this week.

  I want to thank Monica and Stian sincerely for setting up a great course and for your many contributions to the course. I hope you both will facilitate more courses at P2PU, together or separately, and I will likely take more courses here. And I’ll highly recommend P2PU as well. Really, it was a great experience.

  By the way, I think a CSCL book club would be a great idea, and I’d volunteer to help, altho I don’t have time to facilitate or co-facilitate. I have a course from July 4 to mid-August so I won’t be able to contribute much at that time. But before and after, I’m in.

  Thanks again to my great peers, who made this course a pleasure. I hope to see many of you in the book club! 

  Cheers,

  Jennifer

• 
  Stian Haklev   June 17, 2011, 8:16 p.m.
  In Reply To:   Jennifer Claro   June 17, 2011, 7:48 a.m.

  THanks a lot Jennifer for answering. I'd really encourage anyone else to jump in and write some quick replies here as well - long blog posts are of course super welcome, but they can come at any time, but we'd love to get a few more answers to these questions before the end of the week. 

  I spent all of yesterday reading a bunch of the papers you referred to in your last blog post, Jennifer, and working on a reply. Wow, some of those readings are really deep! But that's part of why I like this field, I guess - I feel like a lot of readings in distance education or "online education" don't really have a theoretical perspective and just randomly do some empirical studies etc (like many, but not all of the articles in Clare's course), whereas in CSCL the "standard" is a lot higher. Not to say that all papers are great, of course, but in general I find my brain pushed a lot more. Which is a good thing. And how I should feel, as a PhD student, I guess :) 

  The book club shouldn't be a lot of work, basically just deciding on an article each week (and I really don't want to spend lot's of time debating that! :) I'm happy to start by putting up a few, and if people have suggestions, maybe we could put up a very simple voting system - let's spend energy reading and discussing articles, rather than discussing which ones :)). The difference would be that it would be entirely open to the world, and nobody would "commit" to read articles each week etc. Anyone who wants can read the article, and post during the week, on P2PU, or using a hashtag, and then anyone can attend the weekly meeting.

  Me and Monica are hoping to organize another course in fall, with a slightly different focus (analysis of learning interactions) which will kind of build on this (in fact, that was the original course we wanted to start with, but we realized that it wouldn't make much sense to talk about research methodologies, if we had no idea about epistemologies and theories of learning). We'd also love for anyone who wanted to organize this, or a similar course again! A lot of the work with finding articles etc has already been done (of course you could tweak as much or little as you wanted), and we'd be happy to support you!
   

  Stian

• 
  Rebecca Cober   June 18, 2011, 10:44 a.m.
  In Reply To:   Monica Resendes   June 14, 2011, 10:45 a.m.

  What was the best thing about this course?

  The enthusiasm and dedication of the course organizers and core participants.

  
  Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?

  I think so. I think having the readings organized the way they are will be a good resource for me in the future. It's neat that the P2PU stuff always stays up.
  
  Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week?

  It varied. I started strong and then kind of petered out. The reason for that was I became incredibly busy in my lab work and also in a summer course I was taking at OISE (Mixed Methods research). Unfortunately, this course fell by the wayside a little bit, and I feel badly about that.
  
  How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?

  Only one reading per week, with additional suggested readings? I liked the blog post prompts. Very helpful. And the bi-weekly updates were great. Perhaps there could be sign-ups, and participants could sign-up to lead a discussion, write the prompts for that week, and write the bi-weeklies. I know that theoretically anyone of us could have done that, but if a sign-up sheet were provided, we might have been more likely to jump in.
  
  How could the different tools and communication channels work better?

  The PiratePads were cool, but still not really the best way to communicate because it was so chaotic. I'd still be interested in trying the electronic "pass on" where only one person "speaks" at a time, and when finished "passes on" to someone else.

• 
  Jennifer Claro   June 20, 2011, 5:10 p.m.
  In Reply To:   Stian Haklev   June 17, 2011, 8:16 p.m.

   

  Hi Stian,

  Thanks for your reply. I like the theoretical side of CSCL too, and of learning in general. Heck, theory in general! I’m glad you are finding those articles useful and interesting, I am too.

  A book club with articles and a weekly meeting sounds great. I’ll be able to suggest articles later on, not now, I have a course from July 4 – mid-August, but after that should be able to maintain a viable level of interaction. I guess my participation would be up and down, depending on what’s going on at the time. As long as that is okay, I’m in!

  The fall course that you and M will set up sounds awesome. But I have another course in January and MUST get some work done on the lit review for my dissertation. But please tell me when you get it set up. Maybe I could be a follower?

  Thanks again Stian for a great course!

  Cheers,

  Jennifer