The secret language of students
What are my students doing, when I can't see or hear them?
As one of the two moderators for topic 3, I wanted the task to generate its own momentum. 'Here are the instructions. This is the output. Here are your roles. This is the deadline. Ask us if you have any problems.' I hoped that the team would take control of the task, and make its own decisions about ways of working. One of the assigned responsibilities was communication, and another was time-keeping. I presumed that the first would organise a site for planning the work, and the second would make sure that mini-milestones were reached on time.
Perhaps this happened, and perhaps it didn't. I had no contact with the team between Thursday (when the task was set) and Tuesday (when the team gave an update in our regular meeting). I was not worried about this. I assumed they were finding their own way of working.
On Tuesday, it was clear that the team was hesitating about basic matters - like the meaning of 'course outline', the audience for the presentation, the nature of the presentation they would give. This means that the initial instructions were not clear to the team; and that the assigned roles were not enough, by themselves, to help the team to resolve these questions. Should the moderators have visited the team site, to make sure they were 'on task'?
This is a dilemma for any teacher who has assigned an asynchronous task. Even if the task seems to be well-defined, the students will discover the real structure of the task only when they start to do it. The Tuesday session, which clarified the moderators' expectations, would have been a useful design feature at the very beginning. 'Dear Team! Please work on this task and bring your questions to the next meeting.'
I have used this feature in a campus course. I asked my students to analyse a published neuroscience article, full of methods and technical terms that I knew they would find unfamiliar. I wanted them to come to a tutorial and share their preliminary understanding of these matters, and obtain clarification from me if necessary. Later, they took a test in class based on the article. During this exercise, there was a chance for me, as the teacher, to hear the secret language of students as they struggle with a task. Without the tutorial, I would have seen all their confusions only when I marked their assignment.
The difference between the neuroscience article and ONL Task 3 is the team-ness of the task. If I want a team to make its own decisions based on the initial instructions, I need to make this clear. 'You will receive no further instructions, but the moderators will be happy to comment on early versions of your presentation.'
The secret language of teachers
Teachers and moderators have their own secret language, of course. Our expectations about the task performance, our assumptions about group dynamics, our beliefs about the intrinsic interest or value of the task content. Sometimes, we need to bring our secret language to the classroom, and share our theories with the students. 'The exercise will expose the difficulties of team work...and you should think about this when devising a task...for students to complete as team work.'
The content of the task might not be intrinsically motivating to the students. If they cannot read the teacher's mind...and share the same preoccupations about the future of work...then they might miss dimensions of the task that make it a richer learning experience. I now think that for task 3, the moderators should have produced a short resource, perhaps a 5 minute video, about the future of work. We 'telegraphed' four key features, as part of the task instructions, but these very brief headlines are not enough to transmit the thinking of the moderators:
The increasing fusion of technologies and disciplines
Distributed knowledge and decision making
Agility, obsolescence, innovation
The position of humans in a society of technology and data
The team presentation successfully combined two of these ideas - as requested - but the 'fourth dimension' of the task was missing. We want the students who take the new course to work in ways that illustrate these features - - AND we want the team that designs the new course to work in this way as well.
You can't work in an agile way (for example) if the task has fuzzy outlines. Or, more precisely, you can work in an agile way on a fuzzy task, only if you know that this is what the moderator expects. If we had made this clearer to the team, I think the assigned roles would have made more sense to them. The task would then have illustrated, more successfully than it did, the distinction between cooperation and collaboration.
A lot of authentic problems in the world of work are under-determined...and all of us will need to use the connectivist paradigm to 'join the dots.' I think this is the message of topic 3.