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last.updated 6.13.10

 

Creating Community


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.


Pedagogical Tool Review Presentations

Christy, Nathan, and Diane will present their Pedagogical Tool Reviews to the class.

Discussion–What is Community & other related questions?

We will discuss the following questions:

  • What questions do you have about the readings?
  • 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?
  • 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 to produce desirable outcomes?

Class Activity–Community in the Literature Class

We will continue to represent the committee the English Department that has put together to design a required general education sophomore-level WI Introduction to Literature course. Today we will focus on how we will get the students to work with each other in the course. The committee chair will be taking notes in Google Docs so that other members can follow along.

After we put together the course, we will talk about the ideal software program we will develop to mediate it.

Group Activity–Communities in English 795/895

In the following groups you will choose a media to collaborate with your peers and discuss the following questions.

Group Members Tasks
1 Cynthia, Susan, Danielle, O'Neika,
  • What questions do you have about the blog community analysis assignment?
  • Did you all create 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 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 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 Christie, Tesha, Diane, Zsuzsanna
3 Nathan, Nancy, Chevonne