Text-Focused Wiki = Contextualized Discussion = Better Online Learning

I came across an interesting article in First Monday this morning via Distance Educator presenting research on the increased engagement and focus elicited by a wiki solution for online discussion over a more typical threaded discussion forum.

Student Engagement In Distance Learning Environments: A Comparison Of Threaded Discussion Forums And Text-focused Wikis
The purpose of this study was to improve the quality of students' online discussion of assigned readings in an online course. To improve the focus, depth, and connectedness of online discussion, the first author designed a text-focused Wiki that simultaneously displayed the assigned reading and students' comments side by side in adjacent columns. In the text-focused Wiki, students were able to read the assigned text in the left column and type their comments or questions in the right column adjacent to the sentence or passage that sparked their interest. In post-participation surveys, data were gathered about students' experiences in the text-focused Wiki and prior experiences in threaded discussion forums. Students reported more focus, depth, flow, idea generation, and enjoyment in the text-focused Wiki.

Basically, the wiki solution/interface set the course readings and discussion space in a side-by-side format allowing comments and discussion to be far more contextualized and specificas they referred to reaings adjacent to the comments. Of course in a typical threaded discussion, I'd have my students do the readings, and then discuss them after the fact...usually from memory. Comments are always more vague, and it takes some work getting learners (myself included) to cite specific examples or ideas from the readings.

While I wasn't at all impressed with the layout and interface of their particular solution, I like the concept, and have heard of similar solutions which do not employ wikis, but do allow for embedded discussions within online documents. Many of these are simpler annotation tools, while others provide for a bit more in the way online discussion and dialogue. I've blogged a couple times recently about Viddler's feature which allows me and my students to engage in dialogue within the video file. I just like it when tool support the powerful principle of contexualized feedback--Where discussion and dialogue can occur very near to the actual experience or digital artifacts (video, text, images etc.) being studied. I've seen in my own teaching and learning experiences how dialogue and feedback is richer and more helpful when provided within context.

If you encountered other examples of learner-friendly annotation, contextualized feedback and discussion solutions, please share them here.
-Joel G.

Student Blogs, Ownership & Social Ratings in the Marketplace of Ideas

Cole Camplese and company at ETS are doing fabulous things at (and for) Penn State. Beside hard work, I gotta chalk up a lot of their success to a willingness and openness to experimentation (with apparent administrative support)--not with wild abandon, but in a measured and calculated way.

Student Blogs: In my last post, I shared how I was challenged with trying to find a meaningful way to integrate blogs into my course. Well, I think I'm on to the solution...courtesy of Cole Camplese and Scott McDonald . Cole recently posted some details on how he and Scott McDonald are using blogs and social ratings in the "disruptive technologies" class they co-teach...and I steal, edit and present large swaths of his original post here:

A while back we completed another Hot Team white paper related to social rating sites — think of digg.com as the big example. Essentially a space where content is either aggregated in or submitted by users and then voted on by the community. Lots of people find these types of spaces very important for helping them filter and discover the things that are interesting to them. Scott McDonald and I made the decision to put a pligg (open source) site at the middle of our course. At the start it confused students a bit, but I am starting to see content coming in from student blogs, with comments, and votes. It is really cool to see a community developing before my eyes.

Students [respond] to the course readings in their own blogs (so they “own” the content) and they are aggregated automatically into the Pligg site. They are then given three votes to give to the top posts (and they must comment on the post as to why they voted for it). The top vote getters rise to the top and these then form the basis for the face to face discussion for the week. It feels like it is a solid way to bring lots of pieces of content together and give students a real voice in the organization of emerging conversation.

Ownership: I think I'm finally getting what they're up to and once again feel like I'm a day late and a dollar short (I might be slow, but I catch up fairly quickly). I love the idea that by using individual student blogs, students "own" their comments, ideas and thinking. It stays with them in their own blog. Currently, we generate good discussions in the discussion forums embedded in our LMSs, but this--sometimes very rich--conversation all dies (or gets archived) once the 3 month course is over. By having students post to their blogs, there's a level of public accountability for what they are posting, and their thinking remains with them throughout their studies and potentially beyond.

Social Ratings in the Marketplace of ideas: I think I like the social rating aspect of pligg too. I saw a very cool form of social ratings built into a beta discussion board tool at Indiana U a couple years back, and have long sought for such a marketplace-based approach to sharing/selling ideas. I think social rating systems can help stimulate individual accountability within learning environments, where collectively we can help separate the wheat (insightful comments) from the chaff (chatter). The comments of value generally rise to the surface. There is perhaps a danger of margnalizing less mainstream voices in this process, and faclitating "bandwagon ratings", but I imagine this can probably be mitigated with simple some course policies.

While a somewhat minor issue, the look-n-feel of pligg needs to be significantly decluttered in my opinion to avoid distracting from the posts. As it stands, he default pligg interface appears to present more "clickable" items in each post than raw text which all vie for attention and I find confusing when you want the focus to be on the conversation. I prefer the cleaner look of posts in this pligg platform website http://www.realestatevoices.com/, which has decluttered the interface somewhat.

So, some very intriguing ideas that will likely need refinement through the process of my own experimentation, and by closely tracking the experiments of other innovators like Cole and Scott.

-Joel G.

Ramblings (to self) on purposeful technology use...

Some reading tonight on the folly of teachers building websites spawned some thoughts about the importance of having a purpose for using any given technology or assigning any learning activity. The post talks about how teachers are so often sent to professional development workshops to learn web development or how to build web pages. Too often, however, teachers fail to have a solid purpose for using websites, and their web pages go unused or are never updated remaining eternally "under construction". David Jakes writes :

Teacher Web pages are the HyperCard stacks of 2008.

I agree, but I would edit this to read:

Teacher blogs of today are the teacher Web pages of the turn of the century, which were the HyperCard stacks of the 1990s.

The notion of using technology for a purpose is not new, but was brought up again for me tonight as I read Jakes's post and by questions yesterday from a couple of my students who asked me what we 'd be doing in class with the blogs. I had real no answer and proceeded to remove some vestiges of the "blog" language I had initially tried to shoehorn into my syllabus.

I had been trying to find a way to use blogs in my online course--I'd been trying really hard! It just didn't make sense yet for my course. I believe there are great ways to use blogs (and wikis and podcasts too)...but not for my class this semester. This has frustrated me because as an learning technologist, I really want to use blogs in a class to gain some first-hand experience and best practice knowledge with using blogs in a social/group learning environment. But it is not to be this semester, and I'm glad I didn't take the bait and put the proverbial cart before the horse.

With regard to building websites, my students (who are largely teachers) used to create websites in my class too. I don't address that anymore, but have not yet found the ideal substitute for posting small instructional, media-rich nuggets. Wikis are likely the solution, as they provide a more customizable environment than a blog, but wikis are built for collaboration, and to use them just as modern-day-WYSIWYG web page builders seems less than ideal.

I've not yet found the optimal solution. I think I ideally need an "Bliki" or a "Wlog"--an easy-to-use web publishing environment that has elements of both blogs and wikis. Maybe this is a job for Drupal or Movable Type 4....better yet, our focus in general should first be in helping teachers/instructors understand why, where, and for what purpose to use a given technology, and only then on providing them with knowledge on how to use them and mini successfful experiences in using them.
Well, I'm rambling at this point, but wanted to capture these thoughts as I continue to mull this dilemma over.
-Joel G.

Blogging: Lessons from Leonardo da Vinci

Amy Grahan posted some thoughts on "How to blog without the time sink". I like her comment on not treating posts as article writing, but rather like a "backup brain". She makes three main points on blogging:

1. Blog your initial brainstorming (ideas).
2. Blog your research & discovery (came across x today--just like this post).
3. Blog your interactions (interesting conversations).

A few years ago, I visited an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was an amazing exhibit featuring a bunch of unfinished, not fully formed ideas, drawings and musings. The kind of stuff I doodled in the margins of my notebooks in highschool--only admittedly much better.

I found his unfinished, "unpublished" works amazing...if not more amazing that his polished work. Maybe because I got a glimpse on the process, on the thinking that makes his work so enduring. Though he didn't publish his notebooks, his unfinished "process" is an astounding exhibit itself!

Take a moment to visit the "turning the pages" link at the British Library site to see one amazing early-day blog! (scroll down on site to find Sketches by Leonardo)

So, I agree with Amy Grahan's points for the most part. I generally want and TRY to make each post to be a meaningful nugget. What that often means though, is that I delay writing thought/ideas that are good enough (i.e. great gets in the way of good enough) . It also means that when I do get around to writing, it is often too much. I for one have little patience reading long blog posts, and imagine others do too. So, I'm going to work on remedying this.

This handicap pervades much of my life. As I finish up my PhD dissertation, I have found nearly every step of the way in this process that I have let striving for perfection--notice I said "striving", not "achieving"!--paralyze my progress. I've been doing better lately, but it's a lesson I have to keep re-learning.

Blogging in some ways has, and can continue helping me do what Da Vinci did with his notebooks. It can help me get over my habit of perpetual tinkering and polishing--fearing to release my ideas into the world before they are fully formed.
so with that, and without turning this thought into an "article," I'm going to hit the publish button and see what happens.
-JG
[Update: I went back and edited this post a bunch---aaargh, though it is considerably better (and longer), I just couldn't leave good enough alone. Maybe I need to turn off editing rights for myself ;-) ]

A Note Relevant To (my) Writing:

A few little flowers will spring up briefly in the dry gulley through which torrents of water pass occasionally. But it is steady streams that bring thick and needed crops…Flash floods are no substitute for regular irrigation.

-Neal A. Maxwell
(Notwithstanding My Weakness, p.7)