Category: ONL181

Housekeeping and other practicalities

~ lina ~ Leave a comment

So, I need to finish up my ONL181 writing. I don’t really know what will happen to this blog after the course is finished, but for now I’m thinking I’ll keep it and maybe add stray thoughts when I feel like it. It would certainly be useful for me to have a way of remembering what I was thinking about a year or two ago.

Lately, online learning has been on my mind quite a lot. But also learning in a PBL group, which was actually one of the things that seemed interesting to me before the ONL181 course started. I’ve never participated in a PBL course before, and that proved to be a very interesting experience. I still don’t understand how and when PBL should be used, possibly because of what I normally teach. Neither pure maths nor one-of info-lit sessions really lend themselves to it. I also suspect it takes a bit of practice to learn how to be a good student on PBL courses, I somehow feel like I’ve brushed on the surface but haven’t gotten as deep as I would have liked for some of the things we’ve been working on. But now I know a little of how PBL works at least.

One thing that was really interesting during the course was that we were using tools that were new to most of us for a lot of it. I’ve been trying to notice how I react to these new tools, but also how they work for the others in my group. It’s interesting how differently people take them on, and how we interact with online tools, even though everyone in this course seemed to be quite good at handling technology. Much more so than the students I meet regularly. Their ability to handle technology varies so much that this is one of the reasons I sometimes hesitate to use online tools for teaching. Also, I primarily meet students that don’t take online courses, but are rather more used to face to face instruction.  But the ONL181 course has definitely encouraged me to try to use more online tools, even though I need to do it carefully, choosing the right tools and using them in meaningful ways. I find it hard to know what works sometimes, especially since these days I usually only meet students once during a course, but I’ve decided to try.

I found the video conferencing aspect of the ONL181 course to be working surprisingly well for interaction. This is really something that has changed during the last few years, and something that I believe will make online teaching a lot easier.

So, to put an end to my ONL181 ramblings, it’s been a lot of fun, it’s been sometimes confusing, and I did learn a number of new things. Thanks to everyone in my PBL group! And to the organizers! I’m looking forward to probably act as a co-facilitator for one of the groups in ONL191, so this adventure is ongoing…

Planing and thought

~ lina ~ Leave a comment

My plan to actually blog here seems to not have worked very well. As usual, life got crazy busy, and I was put out by a head cold for a bit. Perfectly normal for November. But even though I haven’t been writing, I’ve been thinking a bit. The fourth topic for the ONL course was designing for blended and online learning, and well… It’s an interesting topic, and made me reflect how hard this can be.

I’m not really a natural teacher, but I’ve been teaching to some extent for the last fifteen years. At the beginning, however, it was done without much afterthought in a way I think it’s done more often than not. During this topic, we discussed models for how group learning in a blended environment can be achieved, and how to design for it. I suppose a lot of the discussion focused on the blended aspect, but I still found myself thinking about the group aspect too. Maybe because one of the reading materials that were assigned for this part of the course was the Five stage model of online learning by Gilly Salmon, which definitely puts online learning in a social context. And like one of the other people in my PBL group pointed out, it pretty well described how our group developed.

During my day to day work, I teach information literacy mainly in one shot sessions. This means that I can’t really watch how the collaboration within a group develops, and I can’t really set up groups unless the people are well acquainted beforehand – it takes too much time to get started when all I have is two hours. But much as I’ve learnt that teaching something greatly enhances my understanding of a subject, this course taught me that a good group collaboration can make me understand a topic better, and to view it from more angles. (It helped to have a good group of people willing to try out things and to talk things through, something I haven’t always had in other courses that included group work. The PBL group I worked with for ONL181 was a great group of people to work with – thank you guys!) Also, what I teach is never a students primary concern. How to search for, sort and use information is something they need to solve another problem. This means that I need to be very deliberate in how I plan for facilitating communication and the production of something that students can use not only for finding whatever information they need at the moment, but to be better prepared for future courses. Right now, I’m thinking about how encouraging them to collaborate perhaps could help them build an understanding of some information literacy concepts, rather than just let the session solve their immediate need for some pieces of literature to fulfil the current assignment.

Failing to focus on essentials

~ lina ~ Leave a comment

The second topic of the ONL181 course was sharing and openness. This part of the course happened during a period when I was very busy at work, and I feel like I didn’t do my best at understanding everything here. I did read quite a bit, true. But my thought process took me not  where the suggested topics imply I should be, but rather focused on how we learn, what a course means and how to put things together.

The PBL group discussion ended up in a couple of different places, and we did learn a bit more about how to share using CC licenses. This is very practical knowledge, and even though I did know about CC licensing it is good to be reminded. I need to do the work too. And really, it isn’t hard to find images that can be used under a CC license. Attribution isn’t that hard either. We should all do it.

However, the group discussions wasn’t what had me thinking most during this part. I kind of got stuck on something in one of the suggested readings, namely a book called The battle for open by Martin Weller. As the author discusses context (or lack of context) as  difficulty for re-use of educational resources, he claims that

Arguably, content with clear boundaries, such as a sine wave function, can be easily separated and then re-embedded in other courses, where these connections are made, but this becomes more difficult for subjects with less well-defined bound- aries, for example taking a learning object about slavery from one context and embedding it elsewhere may lose much of the context required for it to be meaningful.

(Weller, M. (2014). The battle for open. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bam p. 70)

which spontaneously made me want to protest. It could seem like something simple as a sine function could easily be isolated and explained on its own. However, after having taught the basics of trigonometric functions more times than I really care to count, I’m not so sure. And I believe there is something to understand about how students construct knowledge, what students expect from a course and how courses, in general are designed that Weller is missing here, something that has bearing on how reusing content actually works. It’s mostly beside the point he is trying to make, and I’m sure others have pointed out similar things, but I haven’t seen an explanation of it. So let me try to explain what I see as the problem here:

A sine function is something that needs to be explained as a part of a math course including trigonometric functions. It can be used to model periodic phenomena. There’s a picture showing y=sin(x) in the header of this post. There are a number of pictures, exercises, interactive or just explained that can help students understand how it works. MathWorld has a pretty thorough explanation of the basics including a number of graphs that can be redrawn according to parameters chosen by the viewer. However, the explanation found there is far too complicated for the students I used to teach, and it wouldn’t be advisable to use it. My students had, for example, no knowledge of complex numbers, which would be needed to understand that page. In order to include a resource about the sine function in a course, I would have to check very carefully that my students had the right prerequisites to explain them. This would make finding resources very time consuming, but I suppose it could be done, and I could probably find a good resource at a more suitable level. This page doesn’t have much text but contains a very useful visualisation of the relation between trigonometric functions and the unit circle. It would have been a much better resource to use with my students, even though there are a couple of things that I would like to improve before using it. (The toggle between degrees and radians, the lack of gridlines or ticks for other angles than π/2 on the x-axis and 1 on the y-axis for example.) However, if I wanted to use this resource, I would still want to go carefully about it. Math students are usually working very close to a textbook. The course focus would be a textbook with exercises. Introducing a separate resource like this will cause confusion and/or not add very much unless it’s done deliberately. I would need to add questions and problems to solve with the help of this  resource. Those questions should preferably be phrased in a way familiar to the students. In short, it’s a lot of work for me as a teacher. A lot more than would be implied by the notion that a sine function is a small simple object that could easily be lifted out from and integrated to different courses. And in general, I think it is hard to single out pieces that can be turned into small neat educational resources to be reused within another course, at least within a subject as accumulative as mathematics. In fact, I think a module about slavery more likely to be re-usable, especially since students in the social sciences in general have more experience with handling multiple sources and voices in their course materials. But a key here is, perhaps, that a module about slavery would be a module, something that’s a bit larger than just a pretty picture of a function, and something that can be taken in as a whole. Because embedding small pieces in a way that works may actually be more work than creating small pieces that you can use yourself.

 

And as a PS, of course I know that the sine function in the quote was just an example, but it happened to be one I was quite familiar with. And I suspect that an argument similar to the one I just made can be created for many examples of small things many people would believe could be successfully lifted in and out of a course.

 

Literacies

~ lina ~ 3 Comments

A couple of years back, when I started the job I still have, one of the first things that happened was that someone handed me

Mackey, T.P. & Jacobsen, T.E. (2014). Metaliteracy: reinventing information literacy to empower learners. London: Facet Publishing.

and told me I probably was interested. I certainly was, and I believe that was when I first became aware of the multitude of literacies that get discussed a lot. Most likely also the first time I heard about digital literacy. I had spent some time already with the concept of information literacy. Other literacies I’ve been thinking about lately are academic literacy and also data literacy. Somewhere in all those literacies I tend to get lost, feeling that it’s just so many words. But for the last couple of weeks I’ve spent a little time on digital literacy, and I did learn a few interesting things.

Some digital literacy scholars seem to consider information literacy as part of digital literacy. If you come to the subject from the other direction, this seems slightly upside down, since digital literacy, to me, is about how you relate to information no matter if this information is digital or not. However, I suspect this is mostly about where you start. If you want to understand where academic librarians tend to start, the ACRL Framework for information literacy in higher education can be a starting point as good as any. This framework discusses information literacy as it relates to the following points:

  • Authority Is Constructed and Contextual
  • Information Creation as a Process
  • Information Has Value
  • Research as Inquiry
  • Scholarship as Conversation
  • Searching as Strategic Exploration

This blog post, is not mainly about information literacy though. (Or it wasn’t supposed to be.) This should be about digital literacy.

In order to better understand the concept of digital literacy, I tracked down a literature review where they explored three types of definitions of digital literacy.

Spante, M., Sofkova Hashemi, S., Lundin, M., Algers, A., & Wang, S. (2018). Digital competence and digital literacy in higher education research: Systematic review of concept use. Cogent Education, (manuscript just accepted). doi:10.1080/2331186x.2018.1519143

As I understand it, these three types can be considered as building on each other, starting with digital literacy, evolvning into digital literacies and finally becoming critical digital literacies. The definitions used by researchers tended to be based in either policies (just like I did above, by adding a link to the information literacy framework) or to more research based definitions. I found it interesting to see how these evolving definitions seemed to take digital literacy closer to the aspects of information literacy that has always interested me most, That is, how do information seekers actually use the information they find. What do you need in order to find AND USE information in a meaningful way? Perhaps I should understand digital literacy as basically the same, but focusing on using online retrieval and redistribution of information.

I must admit reading about digital literacy has made me a little bit confused. My preconceived ideas would have made it different from information literacy by saying that digital literacy was focused and defined by mode of distribution, whereas information literacy was focused and defined by the goal of integrating new information into one’s knowledge. However, the more I’ve been reading on the subject, the more the lines seem to blur. Also, the choice of term seems to depend a lot on in which discipline the discussion is going on.

A personal reflection on the visitors and residents typology

~ lina ~ 2 Comments

I keep trying to decide whether I should start this post of with some kind of explanation, or if I should just jump in and write a short comment on some of the course material for ONL181. The ONL181 course is the reason I started this blog, and we’ll see how much I write here except for course writing. But one of the first topic suggestions was to share a bit of our online journeys and I thought that could serve as an introduction of me. So I’m just putting this at the start of the blog to get me started and avoid an experience as disappointing as the one had by Dennis Upper (1974).

One of the suggested readings was an article by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu (2011) . There was also a couple of related videos that I quickly lost interest in – so much music and walking around and very little content – not even turning the speed up to 1.25 helped very much so I stuck with the text. The text, on the other hand, I found interesting. I’ve always disliked the digital natives narrative, though my reasons to do so were mainly personal. When I first read about the visitors and residents a couple of years back in a blog post for Jisc written by Donna Lanclos (2016)  I immediately found the model more appealing, but I never went on to read the original source by White and Le Cornu. My reasons for disliking the idea of digital natives were mainly personal – I’m too old to be a digital native, but still I had an online residency before social media was even something anyone had heard of. I lived an large part of my life online from about when I was 15 to around 25, even though towards the end of that period I had met most of the people I interacted with regularly both online and offline. Since then, life outside the online world has seen more appealing, and I simply haven’t had time and energy to spend to maintain more than a very sporadic online presence. These days, I’m much more likely to use a visitor approach to being online. I’m still quite able to use online tools for most things when I need it, but a lot of the time, I just don’t see the benefit of engagement. I just prefer to think of it as something I choose, rather than being the only way things could be based on when I was born. I moved out, and I go back mostly as a visitor.

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Photo by Benjie Dutton used under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Sources

  • Lanclos, D. (Feb 23, 2016) The death of the digital native: four provocations from Digifest speaker, Dr Donna Lanclos, Jisc. Available here
  • Upper, D. (1974). The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 7(3), 497-497. Available here
  • White, D. S. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). Available here