evaluating networks
Hello Everyone,
Let's say that theoretically you were looking over a class network you've been facilitating over the school year. If you were to look at the "health," the "learning value" of it, what would you be looking for? Think of Classroom 2.0 sort of format for a young learning community, on a very small scale. If you were the teacher with an active learning network based on the educational endeavors you're involved in, what would you like to see? When you signed in to see the network, what would make you pleased? What would make you know you were doing well? What questions would you be asking yourself?
Thanks--- would value your input.
Let's say that theoretically you were looking over a class network you've been facilitating over the school year. If you were to look at the "health," the "learning value" of it, what would you be looking for? Think of Classroom 2.0 sort of format for a young learning community, on a very small scale. If you were the teacher with an active learning network based on the educational endeavors you're involved in, what would you like to see? When you signed in to see the network, what would make you pleased? What would make you know you were doing well? What questions would you be asking yourself?
Thanks--- would value your input.
Tags: education+networking, networking
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Britt Gow on
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Hi Connie,
I'm really interested in self-assessment for students. I'd be asking them reflective questions - perhaps "What are the three most important things you have you learnt on our class network?" "What kinds of comments did you find most valuable?" "Has someone assisted you with your learning on the network?""Have you learnt something on this network that you couldn't learn any other way"
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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on
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Hi Britt,
Thanks for your thoughtful questions--they'll be very good to ask the students.
I'm also wondering about what networkers on CR2.0 would look to find in the network that would be reflections of healthy participation. Are there "signs"?
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Hi Connie,
I think the high rate of new members and the number of daily posts - if quantitative data is what you are looking for? Qualitatively, different strokes for different folks. Some people would be getting a lot more out of it than others - depends what your expectations and needs are, I suppose.
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Permalink Reply by Edwin Wargo on
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Hi Connie,
Great thought provoking question!
My first thought after reading your post is that just getting to point of having an active learning community is a great accomplishment. An active learning community (without knowing a lot of the details) would show me that students are engaged and the teacher has done well with facilitating the learning community. For students to become actively involved, I'd think, they would need to have a good foundation in the content.
Someone recently commented that a teacher would respond to paper length questions with "you cook a turkey until it's done". For me quantity of posts especially considering the age and levels of students wouldn’t always be a good measurement. Some students will contribute more and some less.
Somewhere in the evaluation (I haven’t quite got my head around it) I think there is point to see the application of what is learned inside the learning community to outside of the learning community. And I think that's the tricky part because some skills can be "measured" or "seen" rather quickly and some of the learning may take longer to emerge or manifest.
When I engage in this learning community, there are some things I can apply almost instantaneously to my students. Some ideas may take longer for me to apply. I need to reflect, even sometimes outside of the learning community, into a personal learning network, blogging, etc to get to the point of applying them. This is where I can see “measuring” can be difficult. All in all though, I really think some application (or showing the ability to apply) of learning as a result of the community is important.
Hope this helps. And again, thanks for the thought provoking question!
Edwin
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Edwin,
Thanks for the thoughts. I realized afterwards that I didn't frame my question very well; I should have described more about what's actually going on. This year has been highly experimental for me. I'm working on what I conceive of as a frontier of learning, designing ways to have a completely networked homeroom class.
Briefly, the class has a ning for inside and outside of school work and play. Assignments for regular content such as social studies and writing are posted and reacted to by classmates and the teacher. Art work is posted. Podcasts are shared. We're getting more into videos. It's like our studio space, bulletin board, communications system, and community picnic table all rolled into one.
We have current events posted; they have to meet certain criteria of thoughtfulness--and have to contain high-quality links to information sources. We have a section called Ask Elders, in which the students have to interview a grandparent, neighbor, or any older generation friend about an assigned topic, such as music that's been important in their lives, what they enjoyed about their life's work, or slang expressions from different eras. Forums run with Elders' responses to our questions, and students can react to what is shared.
I've been studying complex systems and how they evolve (Wheatley, Capra, for instance) and have tried to evoke a "new kind of teacher" in myself that would actually LET the system evolve. That's what I most want to evaluate, really--how have I done: what am I not seeing, what should I look for and value as signs of health.
Here are some trends that seem marvelous to me.
When students travel, they check in with the class. The traveler will start a forum about where s/he is and what's going on, often updating us with stories and pictures. Classmates react and ask questions.
Students get on the network both for assignments and by choice out of class--in the evenings, over the weekend. They start their own posts about whatever's on their minds: favorite game sites, recipes, poetry, tongue-twisters, questions about what to do when you're bored. They post story starters, questions about favorite animals, questions about favorite--and least favorite cars. The posts are very interactive.
Parents are invited to tour the network with their child, and can leave comments in the parent-reaction section.
The students are starting to want to invite selected others into their class network. Someone's grandpa is on, so is my daughter (a college sophomore), a few magnificent techies in education that the kids have interacted with (or seen me interact with) on various networks, a college professor, and our school librarian. They post forums and responses along with the rest of us.
The network is a home-base for assignments in technology that makes them "go out into the world." Students regularly have assignments on Art Snacks and EFL Classroom. They have a sense of how to operate in bigger networks. They're actively using and discussing internet safety skills. They're using net-etiquette by extending their sensibilities about how they like people to react to their forums and work in their class network.
The latest endeavor for me as a teacher has been to get the kids engaged in an experimental format for learning, a kind of problem-based-learning in which teams of students investigate a multi-faceted contemporary issue, find the "variables in the equation," and make recommendations regarding problem-solution. Recently, I have chosen two topics they knew very little about to see how it'd work, just going off on an information "hunt" and finding high-quality references, interpreting the information together, and then linking information from one facet of the issue to another. (And another, and another.) We studied the current status of the elephant everywhere it lives on earth, and possible scenarios for its future. We studied Global Food Prices. In both of these studies (each taking about 3 hours total) the students--just fourth and fifth graders, anticipated articles that came out fairly soon afterwards in the Economist and the New York Times. (I had the students read and highlight the news articles that came out after their studies, highlighting topics within those overview articles that their teams found to be important variables. Most of the articles ended up highlighted, many even coded in more than one color to indicate how their team categorized the information... I didn't ask them to do that. It just came up as a way to process the information, and the students (I think) felt proud that they had found out so much all on their own.)
Edwin, you talk about creating a learning community. Yes, we have done that. It both goes with class content and doesn't go with content. It's kind of an constantly open exploration. It's like an organism the class is evolving, the organism of their own interactive learning. Oh--I forgot to say that almost half the class has the role of administrator (anyone who wanted the role) and as administrators have set rules for themselves, such as you can't make changes without each other's approval. I know that students feel a lot of ownership in what we've done and are doing.
As a teacher I am very pleased with some things especially. I'm happy with students' growth in writing skills (which I attribute to having a larger audience than just the teacher, and in being able to get ongoing feedback on projects and thoughts). I'm pleased to see in-depth analysis and discussion of information. Oh yes: I'm really pleased to have access to the extended community's (parents and elders) thoughts, to have the thoughts posted in such a way that reactions are invited.
So overall it has been a grand learning adventure, a worthy experiment. Now I'm completing my first year of this sort of teaching (in my 30th year as a teacher) and am wondering what I should be asking myself about next year's network design. What ARE the critical elements that further learning, that make a network a happy and productive place for learning? What am I missing? What should I consider next? What would, for instance, prove to a traditional administrator, or to parents, or to colleagues, that this is indeed a viable base for homeroom classes?
Thank you for the response; I'm thinking about this so much these days, and really appreciate collegial input.
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Permalink Reply by Marlen Rattiner on
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Pedagogically speaking, it seems to me that you are using Ning as a social network to encourage a lot of constructivist oriented activities...
* Embedding learning in complex, realistic, and relevant environments
* Providing for social negotiation as an integral part of learning
* Multiple perspectives and Multiple Modes of Learning
* Encourage ownership in learning
* Nurture self-awareness of the knowledge construction process
...borrowed from Driscoll... citation needed :(
Which fits in quite well with both your use of Ning and your choice of using Problem Based Learning. Looking back on an old master's thesis... PBL:
* Uses ill-structured, complex problems to drive the curriculum.
* Student-centered - learners are progressively given more responsibility for their own education and increasingly independent of the teacher. The responsibility of the teacher in PBL is to provide educational materials and guidance that facilitate learning. (Barrows, 1999)
* Teacher as coach or facilitator – The instructor's role is to encourage student participation, provide appropriate information to keep students on track, avoid negative feedback, and assume the role of fellow learner (Aspy et al., 1993).
* Students work in groups to find multiple solutions to problems (Jones, 1996).
* Learner assessment includes self and peer assessment.
So the textbook prescription would be assessment that includes self and peer assessment - Britt's questions in the first response would be very helpful. And your assessment of the portfolio of the student's work in the system - group projects, involvement with other people's thoughts and activities, possibly a broadened perspective from the start of their involvement to the end.
While one of the nice things about online systems is the data you can monitor (You can see the size of the networks students create, the # of posts, the # of comments) all of which are indicative of involvement and motivation; this data alone could be misleading and would need caution in application. If a student is shy, less computer literate, uncomfortable with the language or generally introverted these numbers might inaccurately reflect their progress. And these numbers are also easy to inflate. Tracking student level page views might help mitigate, but I still worry about using any data like this as a kind of "proof-point". I feel like the best proof of success you have are your results - motivation, involvement, problem solving and their ability to create learning strategies that go beyond the task (like the color-coded strategies you mentioned).
When you ask: What ARE the critical elements that further learning, that make a network a happy and productive place for learning?
I kind of see the question as how can we teach subjects in a way that facilitates thinking - that will enable learners to acquire domain knowledge, solve the real life problems they encounter, and reflect critically on those solutions. And among the answers is that learners need to be actively engaged with learning and use that knowledge as a tool towards important ends. In my mind you've taken the largest step already - All learners taking on the role of content creator, collaborator, interpreter, teacher and community member. Very cool.
Moving forward, one additional exploration you could try technologically is the use of synchronous tools that complement your asynchronous environment. Connecting the student and teacher network together in real-time.
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Marlen,
Thank you so much for your thoughts--
Really appreciate the references about PBL; much appreciated. And also your reflections on what's going on for my class. I will definitely take up your and Britt's suggestions for student self-reflection.
Your suggestion about moving forward with use of synchronous tools--could you explain a bit more about that?
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So currently your students have created a great social network that communicates asynchronously. My thought is that a rather natural expansion might include the synchronous space - helping people in this network communicate and learn from one another in real-time - using some sort of online classroom or Instant messaging client.
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Hi Marlen,
What I might not have made clear is that this IS a face to face, everyday class. The learning is mostly in real time, real world. But it all blends together. I mean, a lot of computers are on, most of the day long. Ideas get played out and posted, reactions occur both within the "live" lesson and on our network.
It was about February that I could no longer draw a line between in-life and on-line learning.
Is that what you were wondering about? Did you think I meant that it was "distance learning"?
Thank you so much for suggesting things, and for helping me to view through various frameworks what seems to me to be a new learning paradigm. New ground, collegial help is so beneficial.
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