Category: Week 2 – Networked Learning

As we watched Michael Wesch’s TEDx talk in class on Wednesday, I found myself relating to his students. With each statement presented in the video, I thought back to my time as an undergraduate student.

I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me. 

Same.

I buy hundred dollar textbooks that I never open.

And then get $10 for them when you try to sell them back to the bookstore. By junior year, I had stopped buying textbooks altogether.

My neighbor paid for class… but never comes.

I’ve been guilty of being that neighbor in some classes. Personally, the classes I enjoyed most have emphasized application. My favorite course as an undergraduate was biochemistry. I was so happy to be done with memorizing endless chemical reactions and start thinking, instead, about how different stimuli affect the human body. I was excited to share my thoughts on case studies rather than filling in bubbles on scantrons. The question of how to engage students doesn’t always have an easy answer. I would say that students are most engaged when they can see the usefulness or relevance of their course material to their lives. This is easier in courses like the 20-student biochemistry course I took as an undergraduate, where instructors and students can get to know each other. But when I start thinking about how to keep a lecture hall full of 400 students engaged, admittedly I’m stumped. I see similar challenges to creating engagement and meaningful discussions when using online platforms in education. The internet is amazing in that it lets us connect to practically anyone on the planet synchronously or asynchronously; and certainly the availability of online courses makes education more accessible by removing geographic barriers. However, whether online or in-person, the question of how to get students to engage critically with course material remains.

In a contemporary context, I think pedagogy can be a “journey of self-discovery, reflection, and collaborative inquiry.” I like Kuh’s argument that education is becoming less about inquiry, but more about careers and competencies. I think his conceptual learning framework assuming a progressive culture of education supports the concepts of self-actualization and student-centered learning. While […]

To begin with a bit of brutal honesty, the thought of learning about academic blogging was not appealing to me.  In my past experience, blogging for class has often felt like a chore.  As a student, I never minded composing the short essay that I would use as a blog post, but the process of commenting on peers’ work often felt forced with a required number of comments and a rigid description of what constituted a substantive comment.  Unfortunately, the simplest criterion for an acceptable comment was a question, to which a response was required.  The result unsurprisingly felt like an uninspired and obligatory conversation on a Canvas page.  As a TA, the process of grading blog comments felt similar.  The comments often met the bare minimum requirement set for a perfect score but rarely brought about meaningful conversation or insight. However, as a student of higher education, I was excited to read Gardner Campbell’s piece that examines networked learning as experiential learning.  I hoped that reading about networked learning in the context of George Kuh’s high-impact practices would help me see academic blogs in a more positive light. Kuh’s high-impact practices have been a point of professional interest since I discovered they were the basis of a meaningful program in my undergraduate work.  I graduated “with leadership distinction” from the University of South Carolina by taking part in a program where I created an ePortfolio about an internship I had completed.  The process of reflection and creating that ePortfolio generated a lot of self-knowledge and helped me clarify my professional goals, but it was not until later that I realized that high-impact practices were at the center of the program.  While the nomenclature was made to be easily understood by students, the requirements of the project were to create an ePortfolio (a high-impact practice in itself) about one of four high-impact practices: undergraduate research, global learning, service learning, or an internship.  Having experienced this first-hand, I am always eager study high impact practices or incorporate them into my work as a practitioner of higher education. Because of my past experiences, I read Campbell’s piece very critically.  To equate my underwhelming blogging experiences with the high-impact practices that proved so meaningful to my learning simply seemed wrong, even if my evidence was anecdotal.  However, upon further consideration, I realized that networked learning (including blogging) shared characteristics with many of Kuh’s high-impact practices I already saw as meaningful.  It can involves writing like a writing-intensive course would, can involve collaboration, can be a learning community of its own (albeit a digital one, which is unlike those Kuh describes), and ultimately may be comprised of the same sort of reflection one would use to create an ePortfolio.  As Campbell points out, this sort of collaboration can provide learners the authority to make their own connections, and that seems characteristic of high-impact practices. These are all things that networked learning can be; blogging can be a high-impact practice.  Still, I can undoubted say the blogging that I experienced was not that.  In thinking about what created that disconnect between theory and practice, I quickly found what I perceive to the problem: an approach to blogging that centers on grades.  This attitude might be described by the notion of “getting by” from Michael Wesch’s TED Talk, the attitude that manifests itself as questions like “How many points is this worth?” or “How long does this paper need to be?”  When the experience is reduced to its bare minimum for the sake of sliding by with an A, its high-impact ceases to be.  Grading remains a necessity, and thus a complex problem presents itself. Grades are important.  A GPA can be a major factor in determining whether a student is admitted to their ideal graduate program or gets the job they want.  Hence, there is an importance to providing students guidelines and metrics on how their grades are to be determined.  It maintains a sense of objectivity in grading and provides students more control in reaching their goals.  While it only seems fair to create grades based on objective measures, learning and engagement are not objective measures.  Hence, grades become separate from learning, as demonstrated in my blogging experiences.  The comments that I read as a TA – and even those I wrote as a student – often succeeded in meeting the requirements for full marks but failed to engage students in the full potential of networked learning. This poses a problem with no easy solution, far broader than academic blog posts.  How can we engage in learning if we are focused on grades instead of learning itself?  As an educator, I can appreciate the approach of this course’s blogging requirements.  Separating learning and grades allows engaging with course content and the ideas of peers to become the priority (and blogs that can be seen by the public eye adds implicitly heightens standards).  While this approach may not be directly related to each of my other endeavors as an educator, it serves as a reminder of the importance to highlight learning over grades, even if there is no simple means to that end.  That said, the reminder is perhaps more pertinent to me as a learner, where I have the autonomy to determine whether I am deeply engaging in learning or just getting by for the sake of a grade. I can always choose learning.  How can I encourage students to do the same?

Just like Seth Godin and Tom Peters mentioned, blogs, microblogs or other “We media” are useful marketing tools for free. Of course, those tools can make a great difference in education. I strongly agree that the blog provides an effective channel to clearly express my views on certain things publicly. As a student major in social science, I can communicate online with other people with similar interests that I cannot find without a face-to-face communication. I can debate with people about a certain public policy with opposite political views, and also join the online community which focuses a topic that I concern. Networked learning has become part of my life already—I always use Sina Weibo (a Chinese microblogging) and “moments” function in Wechat. I have participated in many Wechat groups for academic purposes. Group members share the literature they have read and discussed them. Unfortunately, I did not find that Facebook has similar functions. I think social media (including Twitter) can play a more important role than blogs because the communication is instant. However, my point is networked Learning: Important but cannot replace face-to-face education. In my previous courses, many professors asked for blogging and the results are different. In a course with 40 students, the professor just asked to post blogs, nobody made comments even the professor. This is no different from ordinary homework. In another course with 12 students, we are required to post blogs no less than 600 words every week and no requirement for making comments. Some students made comment actively, but very few. The key thing is that the professor discussed the content of our blogs in class—students are very positive about this. This is what I realize that networked learning is just a tool, the effect still depends on individuals. Face-to-face education is will never be replaced. Sometimes I have to suspect that networked learning maybe is an excuse for professors to be lazy. With or without networked learning, professors should play a leading role in class instead of just emphasizing the “creative” of students.

I have not always been a huge proponent of the use of the internet, specifically online social networks, within the educational process. If you would have told me a couple of years ago that I would be helping to institute an Instagram assignment in the lab that I am a graduate teaching assistant and would be designing my dissertation project research on the use of social networking sites as motivators to worksite wellness interventions, I would have said, “What is Instagram?” and “I already have Facebook.”

Sometimes I think that it is especially difficult for those in older generations to foresee the future of education. If we are expected to teach the younger generations then it seems only intuitive that we listen to their interests and adapt to them, not the other way around, which seems like a pretty backwards of doing things if you think about it. The typical practice of lecture and then regurgitation of information has been pressed upon most children within the typical educational system by those who are older than them. Instead, let us learn from our students and embrace the technology and what they have to teach us about more interesting ways to learn. With student’s hands practically glued to their cell phones, we need to stop trying to get them to put their phones down and quit forcing them to step away from their online communities and instead encourage them to lean into the digital world and the realm of educational content that exists at their fingertips.

Regardless of generation, the vast majority of those who go online think the internet has been good for them personally. Therefore, I feel that it is important that the educational system continue to evolve and to push the outer limits of what is possible in education. If experiential learning is considered education, then why not networked learning?

Network learning is quite imparting and experiential. It can both give a positive and negative reaction in so many areas, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be within an enclosed building because it has to do with technology. In this view, the research that was done by Dr. Michael Welsh, reveals that network learning gives learners access to express themselves without being seen physically and it improves the metacognitive aspect of the learner. In an academic, network learning produces teamwork as well, whereby individual learners try to learn by doing what they love with support from each other. This means learning inside knowledge, therefore making individual learners public humanist because the learning is not limited to a building. Finally, network learning can include a blog, twitter and so on, comprising of both the expert and non-expert.

After seeing the TEDxKC discussion by Dr. Wesch titled “What Baby George Taught Me About Learning” in class, I noticed that the message he provided regarding questions that were being ignored in the classroom really hit me hard. The questions, Who am I? What am I going to do? Am I going to make it? I thought the fact that he was having lunch with his students allowed him to advance his research theories but more importantly provided greater benefit to the students themselves. Personally I’ve always felt that having a personal connection with professors and supervisors has enabled me to perform beyond my initial expected capabilities. Similarly, group projects during undergraduate and post-graduate teams allowed me to build personal connections, friendships and networks. Gardner Campbell’s publication discussed networked learning as experiential learning.I interpreted experiential learning as a different approach to sitting in the classroom and collecting (or trying to collect) facts from a professor. Although, not directly tied to this class I also happened to be looking into mission and vision statements of different universities. One thing I picked up in reviewing mission statements is the emphasis universities place in the “experience” they provide to their students. It’s hard to assume that every student will have the same experience individually, but by allowing students the opportunity to work together and by professors being an active presence and resource to student groups, I believe the networked learning & experiential learning can have a greater positive effect. I believe the inclusion or encouragement for students and professors to share their blog can directly contribute networked and experiential learning. Professors can reach a higher audience and “control a corner of the web” as stated by Doug Belshaw, and also speak directly to their students and possibly form a personal connection by praising and admiring the good things the individual students, group of students or student teams do in class.  Similarly, students can gain experience and begin to understand the power in sharing their ideas, communicating their findings and having a presence in the new era of connectivity. Having such a resource freely available to them is an excellent example of both networked learning and experiential learning.

In taking this class, I am hoping to achieve three main goals. 1) to develop a clearer understanding of teaching pedagogy 2) to create a portfolio of works I can utilize in the future 3) to grow in my journey as a student and an educator This week’s readings have gotten me off on the right foot, I believe, by giving me a look into what the future of education may entail. If you had told me ten years ago that blogging and online presences would be the face of higher education, I would probably laugh and readjust my dial-up connection. And yet, here we are! The advancements that have been made in networked learning just in the span of time when I was as an undergrad to now as a graduate student is astounding. I especially appreciated the emphasis on using online resources and technology as “experiential” learning, as a way of knowing by doing. The Campbell reading suggested “the experience of building and participating within a digitally mediated network of discovery is itself a form of experiential learning“, and that really struck me. After all, isn’t the point of teaching to help others develop an understanding of a subject? Why, then, shouldn’t we encourage our students and colleagues to extend our learning to online communities and outlets? In utilizing resources like Twitter and encouraging students to blog, I think we can extend knowledge to the online classroom. With so many of us getting our daily news fix from social media, it makes sense to create an online presence that is focused on furthering academic ideals, rather than simply social ones. I for one am excited to see where our advancements take us, but also hope that the importance of face-to-face education is never doubted. May we all be like Baby George, excited to fail in order to get that one step closer to succeeding.