Bodies, presence and limbo - reflections on topic 4
How do we engage online?
At the beginning of his seminar on topic 4, Martin Weller asked 'What would really ruin an online course?' It's a good question, exposing a lot of the assumptions about campus learning that do not transfer well to the online space. When we record and upload a video lecture, or read through our slides in a web conference (two common modes of online learning) we might suppose we have done our jobs - we have 'delivered the material' and now it's up to the student to learn it.
Many students feel comforted by the traditional feel of these videos and web conferences. Here they are, in the traditional 'waiting for input' mode that students can become accustomed to, even on campus. If only we keep coming to class, we will surely learn something by facing the front. If we wait long enough, our patience will be rewarded.
Features of embodied splace
The campus features that make this mode tolerable are missed by some students; hanging around before or after class, social cues and signals and gestures during the lecture, chance encounters in the cafeteria queue. Other students, by contrast, are happy to trade these features for convenience. 'I don't even have to get out of bed to join the course...actually, I don't even need to join the course, as long as I hand in my assignments.' In the limit, the course becomes a sequence of assignments to upload. It is hard to blame these students, if the online course is not designed to require any more 'body.' Micro-modular designs collude with students collecting badges, rather than participating in an academy. What would an embodied splace look like, and how would students move through it? How do students and staff 'show up for work' in the distributed academy? Some principles:
- Students are seen and heard - by each other and by teachers.
- Students work in collaboration on authentic challenges.
- Students have a sense of their own trajectory and progress.
- Students are incentivised to make decisions about their learning, and to cultivate their own networks.
The emotional ecology of splace.
This 'what it feels like' is frequently overlooked in online provision. Points #1, #2 and #3 above come close to the idea of student Presence (their own and others), a factor of the CoI model that we explored in our topic 4 challenge. How can we cultivate Presence using the ICEBERG framework? Can we apply ICEBERG to the topic 3 'future of work' module we designed? As a team, we had no trouble filling the boxes - every letter from ICEBERG was annotated. All team members carried out this activity independently, to avoid influencing each other prematurely, before compiling the table.
We did not attempt to distil our answer into an 'irreducible set' of seven (or fewer) statements. Looking back, this now seems reasonable. ICEBERG is already a set of 7 principles, and our team exercise unpacked these principles and applied them to our CIMP module.
Convergence in Splace
There are occasions, nonetheless, when a team task needs to converge onto a decision, recommendation or solution. It is worth asking how we can get students to do this. Here is a suggestion. Two teams form a reciprocal assessment centre. Team B reviews the Team A interim answer, and prepares a very simple implementation plan. This could be a ranked list of actions, or a binary split into short-term and long-term actions. 'Here are 10 actions that implement your solution. Do you agree with our rank order, or do you want to rank them differently?'
Team A then discusses the ranking and reaches a consensus. Team A does the same for Team B. The merit of this is i) a 'sense check.' Does an independent peer group understand what you are proposing? ii) A new and authentic step in the task, the implementation plan. iii) An incentive for Team A to agree with the implementation plan on the table, or produce a counter-plan. Other variations are possible. For example, team B could identify the top 3 priority actions, or propose two alternative plans.
The pyramid and the iceberg
One of our Team was impressed by Bloom's Taxonomy during her research for topic 4. Bloom emphasises types of learning, and how this learning is evidenced or performed. At the base we have facts, figures and descriptions. At the pinnacle we have novelty and creation. The Bloom approach contrasts with ICEBERG, which is a set of high-level design principles about student retention. Here is an interesting tension. A new programme might be fully ICEBERG compliant...with elements of collaboration, engagement, reflection....and still 'stuck' at the base of Bloom's taxonomy.
The only remedy for this is to base all academic work on challenges, frontiers, controversies. This is a 'top down' way of learning the subject, and of finding out 'what you need to know.' If we always begin from the ground rules, then students never reach the take-off point.
The geometry of Splace
My experience of bottom-up failure is computing programming. I never get beyond lesson 3 because I can't see how any of this elementary work will lead to a programme that accomplishes a job for me. There must be another way of starting with the problem and reverse-engineering it, and then finding out what kind of code would be needed.
I use this approach in teaching biomedicine. Here is a patient and their symptoms. What questions can we ask about the symptoms, and what are the biological phenomena that give rise to them? Over the course of a semester, the students can learn all the elements of cell biology, biochemistry and genetics in an integrated way. The students reach the top of the pyramid when you tell them a collection of symptoms, and a single gene mutation, and ask them to propose a mechanism AND its treatment.