Random Thoughts

It’s that time of year again when I plug TESOL’s Electronic Village Online sessions. The info on this year’s sessions can be found here. It’s free. You don’t have to be a member of TESOL to participate. You don’t have to be an English teacher. Check out the offerings and see if there isn’t something that interests you.

I have been sitting here for half an hour trying to decide if it is better to have a lame post than no post at all today. I finally decided that lame was better than nothing. And actually, I want to talk about something that isn’t lame at all: TESOL’s Electronic Village Online 2008.

Every year about this time I plug it, and this year is no exception. Check out the call for participation. It gives you a basic idea of the sessions that are being offered this year.

Well, we have reached the end of the EVO course. I can’t believe what I have learned! I would never have done this on my own!

The big IF at the moment, of course, is what happens now. I think I will continue to blog. I am quite sure I will, as a matter of fact. I also want to get my students to do the orientation, tips and hints blog that I mentioned previously. I think that is all I can do with my beginning students this late in the semester. And it is a good introduction to blogging that would serve a good purpose. It could be commented on and added to as time goes on.

So while it is the end, I hope it also just the beginning of our true blogging endeavors.

The Australian Flexible Learning Community has a great post entitled “Learning in Communities”. I like a lot of what I read there. I like the people they quote, like Howard Rheingold.

The section that I would like to mention here is entitled “What makes a community successful?” The authors cite eight attributes .

The first strikes me as being most important: a community has to be about something. That makes the community authentic. If the community has no real focus, it can’t be sustained. If the focus is not really of interest to the participants but is imposed from the outside, I don’t think it will work, either. This seems like it might be part of the problem when students don’t want to blog. We have to find a way to make students take ownership. And we have to really want them to take ownership.

Second, the authors believe that the members must feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves. This is facilitated by interaction among the members. I wonder if the type of interaction, the type of messages shared by members matters. In my recent experience with another online course, there was a lot of interaction, many messages shared. But I never felt I was part of it. For me, anyway, the type of message made a big difference. I wanted to discuss the topic differently than the others, it seems. Judging from the reduced number of messages as the course progressed, I don’t think I was alone.

The third attribute is that content and communication must be integrated. This means, as I understand it, that the discussion remain focused. I actually think this was the problem with the other course. I don’t want to say discussion was hijacked, but it didn’t seem to be widely applicable. And it didn’t always seem on-topic.

The fourth is that participants’ contributions must be appreciated. I think that is one of the many things that made the community created by this course so successful. Our early posts were always acknowledged and commented on. Commenting on the blogs was a group assignment that first week. The facilitators continued commenting throughout the course. Our questions were answered as soon as they were asked. Because of their example and the way the course was designed, I think most of us felt that sense of community.

As a fifth attribute is that a community needs ongoing communications if it is to continue. They say that communication must be a primary objective of the community as opposed to a sideline. Because this course was about blogging, it would have been hard to leave communication out of it. Here again, I have to refer to the other course I was in. The communication was not necessary. It wasn’t really required. Communication consisted of answers to assigned questions and reports of activitied undertaken. In other words, there wasn’t much real communication.

The authors offer the fact that a successful community empowers its members as the sixth point. The go on to talk about the special value of this in learning communities and explain that it is done by means of organizers giving participants the resources and information they need to “build their own learning”. Here again, the organizers of this course deserve high marks. We were given access to the knowledge, to the resources, to the “experts”. We made our own learning and, as a result, that learning is real and solid. And ours.

The seventh attribute is that a learning community must have an educational orientation. What happens within a learning community must have a pedagogical purpose. In a classroom community, there must be a gradual progression to more and more complex discussion. This is something we have really seen in this course, I think. The organizers set it up so we could get our basic introductions and such out of the way before the course actually began. Then we becan with just learning to do the basics – and all the questions that came along with that. As we have moved through the weeks, we have learned to so more complicated tasks and we have started looking at the theory, the principles underlying blogging. That is where we find outselves this week — looking at the core issues involved rather than the surface niceties.

Lastly, the authors state that a community must have a sense of history if it is to be successful. We have to know that this isn’t all going to end this coming Sunday. The authors say that as part of this history there should be a class archive. This is what we have been doing with the wiki all along.

Based on the characteristics of a successful community outlined in the article, I would have to say that this is, indeed, a successful one. I am grateful to have been a part of it. The challenge is to take what we have learned here about blogging and about communities and put it into practice in our own situations.

Well, for those of you with nothing better to do than look at my blog, I was successful in getting the mp3 button inserted into my earlier audio post. It was so easy! (Thanks, Nathan, for continuing to challenge us – and for supplying us with the information we need to do it!)

But all this has led me to wonder why I am so excited by this button. Does it really matter if I know how to go to Cool Archive and make a button? Every time I learn how to do something, I realize that there are ten more things I don’t know anything about yet. In some ways, I seem to be getting further and further behind. And since we are all using aggregators to read each others’ blogs, you may not even see the image, the fruit of my labors!

So I may be the only one who appreciates my discovery. My success will go unnoticed by the world. But to my eyes, every little trick I learn is one less thing I don’t know. And that, to me, is success.

mp3 button
Originally uploaded by mckeand.

Here’s the mp3 button I made. I want to insert it in my audio post, but I wanted to let you see it here – in case I never get it in the post.

First of all, I have to give credit to Sarolta for helping me to see that I might, indeed, want to do audio blogging. Her T/F quiz on the audio post let me see a whole range of possibilities I hadn’t really thought of before. I don’t usually teach listening and speaking, but I like to have ideas like this to pass on to others or to use myself when I need. I will definitely remember this one! (Can you tell I wasn’t able to attend the chats this past week? Is my ignorance showing? I’m quite sure it must be!)

Now, to address comments and questions made to my last post about how I inserted the audio both the first and second times. I actually owe it all to Bettina and the people who helped her figure it out. Yes, I recorded the audio and then finally understood that I could save it to some web space provided by my ISP. Then, I looked at Mike Coughlan’s instructions for embedding audio. It involved looking at the code for his page, copying the code, inserting it in my blog post, changing the URL to the URL where my audio was saved, and then posting.

Because Nathan reported being unable to open embedded audio, I redid it by inserting the link into my blog, just like I did to direct you to Sarolta’s and Bettina’s and Mike’s and Nathan’s blogs. That was easier, of course, because I didn’t have to personally insert the code. It maybe doesn’t look as spiffy, but I am not really concerned about that. What I would want is to be sure people could listen to it, regardless of their operating system or other software issues.

In his blog Nathan just raised the issue of some people not being able to listen to embedded audio. So I thought it would be a good idea to try doing it the other way. So here is my attempt to post my audio another way. (It’s the same blurb as the first one. No need to listen a second time if you have already heard it!)

I can totally relate to what Bettina said about jumping and singing when I was able to hear my audio in my blog. I am in my office right now, so I tried to hold the actual jumping and singing down, but inside I was definitely dancing around the room!

One of the best things for me personally with this course has been discovering all the things that I can do. I have experienced the joy of success over and over and over again. It is a feeling I need to try to remember and I need to try to make sure my students feel on a regular basis. Knowing how good it makes me feel, how could I not want that for them?

This has been an interesting week for me. The addition of aggregators to my life has, indeed, made a world of difference. I am reading more and thinking more. Unfortunately, it seems I am writing less. But maybe that’s OK for now.

Bettina and I were involved in Group 5 this week. I was interested to see how differently we approached the task. Bettina is definitely more industrious than I am! And I think she understands all this better than I do, too. She made a wonderful chart looking at all the features of the different services. I only looked at them to see what I could do with them. I found that Bloglines was much easier to figure out than the others. Of course, I had step-by-step instructions on what to do with Bloglines, so maybe that gave it an unfair advantage! But at any rate, I didn’t find anything that I think I would really want to use the others for. Maybe I am just not into this enough yet, though!

But we have these two charts now, and we are waiting for Bee to help us figure out how to post them to the wiki. And where. She promises to help next week, so you will have to wait until then to see the results of our (mostly Bettina’s) hard work!