Well, that was interesting.

Two weeks left of semester.  All my plans of learning new things with the Designing for Flexible Learning Practice Course and Learning Ruby on Rails have come to naught under the weight of the Wiki Assignment and The Dreaded Excel Assignment.  I’m not sure where all my time goes, but it seems there is way too much spent on managing technology.  I’m even behind on reading my feeds.

But I’ve had a few interesting discussions lately.  One during a web services advisory meeting where we started to talk about video, got on to YouTube and ended up discussing the vagaries of txt spk.  It reminded me of the book I have had in mind to write for a while.  There seems to be a need for something that maps pedagogy onto process onto technology.  I’ve spoken to people about this mentioning mapping technology and pedagogy and seemed to get a negative response.  But the other day, someone at the meeting was talking about how we know what technology supports what kinds of learning and I said “That’s the book I want to write!”  The reply was a very positive: “That’s the book I want to read.”  That’s my plan for the next few months.  I think.  I’m going to try to think about all the things we try to do and all the technologies we currently have (or seem to be appearing on the horizon) and see whether I can come up with ‘flexible’ approaches to using the technology to achieve particular learning outcomes.  Whenever I have time, I’ll post something here to get my ideas down and hopefully next year, get some time off teaching to start putting it together.

The other interesting ‘discussion’ was between Luke (the co-convenor of the two of the wiki courses I teach) and me and we got very vocal and passionate about our ideas when after about 30 minutes we realised we were arguing the same point.  It seems that I know all this stuff about wikis and students don’t [true].   It seems that I need to structure the entry points for the courses better [I do].  Luke kept telling me how I was way up here and everyone else is way down there (picture, if you will, a big burly guy waving his arms up and down).  Meanwhile, I’m trying to tell him that we should modify the WikiEducator tutorials and put them into our course to meet the needs of our students.  I think we’ll be taking the editing and formatting pages and putting them somewhere for the students.  Where Luke and I are a bit vague is how to reward students for this.  They are skills the students need to complete the assessment so it could be worth 5% of their marks to complete them (and creating their own page in Blackboard in the process) or it could be they get access to the space (more wikis – just what I need) to submit their assessment.  I’m in two minds about this (classic sign of a gemini).  On the one hand, they are learning and demonstrating their learning, on the other hand, they will be assessed separately for how they submit their annotations in the assessment wiki.

Perhaps there is a compromise.  Perhaps we need to reward them for learning, but when it comes to the assessment item, detract marks for silly mistakes that they shouldn’t have made if they’ve done the wiki learning task.  That feels a bit like punishing them, but if we start from the assumption that they can do it and they have already been rewarded for achievement, we shouldn’t need to reassess that (except where it makes life difficult for everyone).  Given our recent experience with the simplified wikis in Blackboard, I’m inclined toward rewarding the learning task then detracting marks.  It’s way too easy for them to not care whether they’ve got it in the right place, whether they’ve deleted someone else’s work, whether it’s logical to put information about spreadsheets on a page named word-processors or even if the page name is important.

I suppose this will be a topic for another discussion with Luke.