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last.updated 6.16.14

 

Creating Community

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Purpose

When teaching writing from a distance, instructors who want to replicate good constructivist pedagogy by having students engage each other have to design strategies to get the students to communicate with each other. However, the instructor has to decide both how to mediate the interaction and how to design the communication through the media to promote its effectiveness. Today we will question what community is, when it is desirable, how to create it with various technologies, and how to make it work effectively.

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Instructional Tool Review

Kelly, Carol, and Jenny will be respectively present their instructional tool reviews and field questions.

Discussion I–Adobe Connect, Redux

We will discuss our experience using Adobe Connect and what its affordances offer to a distance education course.

Discussion II–What is Community & other related questions?

We will discuss the following questions:

  • What questions do you have about the readings?
  • Is there "something" tangible that we can call a "community"?
  • When we talk about creating "community" in the online classroom, what exactly are we trying to create? How can we assess whether we, as instructors, have been successful at creating it? How does community differ from collaboration, cooperation, or just communication? Is community as desirable and/or relevant for distance learning as it is for F2F courses?
  • When it comes to trying to facilitate commuity, what strategies should instructors use to determine whether to adopt synchronous and/or asynchronous communication with/among their students?
  • What pedagogical activities would you use the technologies for mediating communication? Do these activities require community formation to be effective?
  • What is the relationship between communities, civility, and consensus? What strategies would you use to design desirable outcomes?

Group Activity–Communities in English 724/824

In the following groups you will "meet" in a the technology of your choice and collaborate with your peers to discuss the following questions. You will have until the end of class and you will not be reporting back to the class. Instead use what you have discussed to help compose your Blog Community Analysis.

Group Members Tasks
1

Kelly, Suzanne, Ryan, Jenny
  • What questions do you have about the blog community analysis assignment?
  • Did this classcreate a community with the blogs? Support your response with evidence from the blogs.
  • If we use blogs in our distance learning writing courses, will the interactivity they afford help to foster a community among one's students?
  • Also could the blog assignment been designed in such a way as to better facilitate the goal of creating community? Try to go beyond, "the instructor could have required us to comment," as your only response. Had the instructor required comments why would a community actually resulted?
  • Was there evidence of community in other aspects of the course other than the blogs? what facilitated this? why did it happen?
2 Carol, Sarah, Kristina, Laurie
3 Shantel, Daniel, Margie

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