Författare: Markus Schneider

ONL221 is an online course on open networked learning. These reflections are part of the course assignment. This one is on topic five – Lessons learned and future practice

Suggestions for reflections

What are the most important things that you have learnt through your engagement in the ONL course? Why?

What are you going to do as a result of your involvement in ONL? Why?

A main finding of attending the ONL course is: Eighty hours is simple not enough time for meaningful participation. And all warnings of our facilitator (“do not immerse yourselves too much, be aware of your time“) seem to point into the same direction: There is something in the construction of the course that provokes this experience. To me this is the combination of more outcome oriented course requirements together with the invitation of an almost self organized group learning journey.

Whenever a quantitative outcome is set as a way of monitoring and being able to assess learning then outcome focused perspectives are invited by design. In this case the scaffolding of both group work and individual assignments as blogs and commenting on other blogs represented these requirements. On top of that, it is left open to cooperating institutions to set different expectations when it comes to institutional learners. With suggested time credits of 80 hours it should not be astonishing that participants will chose the product oriented way. But is this the intention of the course?

In contrast to that, facilitated problem based learning groups were, presumably depending on the facilitators specific introduction, more or less free to follow their own collective learning journeys around given scenarios, scaffolded only by the fish model. Since I have followed all invitations to webinars and discussions across different groups I have understood that there is quite a variation between different groups approaches. Whereas some seemed to work more outcome oriented, time efficient and in a getting the tasks done mode, other groups, like my own group 7, really enjoyed the process of getting to know each other, building relationships and trying to be in the process of learning and presence with each other and the topic at hand. Our cultural, professional and digital literacy differences evolved into a truly helpful, caring and collaborative learning environment. To me, this is something course organizers hope for, to sparkle the light of collaborative learning and community building. If we call this the more process way, then maybe a question is

how can course requirements be adapted to more focus on achieving process types of outcome?

Again I want to compare to the Art of Hosting approach: In my own experience, this group cohesion is more often than not the case for an Art of Hosting hosting team. My understanding is that this is due to the central role of co-creation of the purpose and the shared practices of self hosting, being hosted, hosting others and sharing as an ongoing practice. It is not obvious to me whether the facilitation of ONL groups has similar practices in place? As a consequence of that I would wish then to ask for permission to enter the facilitation learning space of the ONLverse in order to learn more about it and maybe

reflect upon difference between facilitation and hosting  as another level of insight to ONL development.

On the other side, ONL with its scenario build approach is interesting to offer the AoH community as a new format to combine the mainly synchronous structure of community learning assisted by facebook post with a more systematic blended format.

Finally, since the topic included allusions on future practice, I attended a webinar on digital futures last week and earlier on a session on future prototyping. There are quite a variety of future studies methods that I did not know of. Maybe an activity for future ONL courses and this specific topic could be

to arrange a speculative design prototyping activity with the ONL course 2040 as a starting point?

ONL221 is an online course on open networked learning. These reflections are part of the course assignment. This one is on topic four – Design for online and blended learning.

Suggestions for reflection

– Reflect on how you can provide support, facilitation and scaffolding for students in online and blended learning environments.

Working at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Karlstad University (Kau) we do not directly support students but teachers who have to support, facilitate and scaffold for students. We have a rather long tradition of online and blended learning study programs and courses at our university but that does not mean that everybody is experienced in designing for online learning . For those who are, asynchronous online modes have pre-pandemic also been more prevalent than synchronous ones. So the reflection here is rather about how we tried to assist teachers in providing support, facilitation and scaffolding when the pandemic forced everyone into online settings. Amongst other things like setting up a specific website and staffing a drop in support zoom room we offered a series of workshops, one directed to study program and course leaders who in particular had to welcome new students online.

The workshop was divided into two sessions and co-designed by an experienced online and blended teacher and me as learning designer. Luckily, we could also use a recent investigation into needs of online students at Kau conducted by our colleagues at reThink Kau . They have formed an own method of user centered investigation based on service research methods.

Our intent for workshops participants was

• to experience a highly interactive and engaging synchronous online format during the workshop
• to get a very short theoretical and empirical motivation for our design recommendations
• to get very concrete and practical tips to start preparing and building courses

Engagement

Since our participants were all experienced teachers we invited their questions prior to the session. In the beginning of the workshop we asked them to restate their questions to each other in a 1-2-4-all /impromptu networking small group variant. This was a low threshhold type of activity encouraging everyone to talk and getting to know each other thus aiming at psychological safety. An activity clearly in need of scaffolding by teachers when students cannot meet onsite. After each activity we asked for reflections and how the activities were experienced or if any obstacles to using them in their own context existed.

Motivation

The theoretical background was based on my colleague’s own reseach grounded in motivational theory and long standing practical experience as an online and blended teacher. The empirical investigation of the experiences of our own online students, gave us a number of valuable statements that pointed to areas that needed improvement. Most prominent maybe, students feeling of being seen as second class members in hybrid settings, very diverse structure of content in learning management systems and the lack of presence in both social and teacher dimension.

Hands on

As hands on activity we were looking behind the zoom/padlet/menti scene to demonstrate how the different experienced activities could be achieved. These demonstrations were accompanied by invitations to more in depth workshops on how to handle each software.

The design storyboard (swedish only) itself we also offered as a resource. It is, for us, the foundation for co-hosting synchronous sessions and building a shared understanding of how different activities link to the intended outcomes.

A commented template design storyboard was distributed at the end of session one for participants to start designing their first online meeting with new students. Workshop two was then conducted as trio coaching activity to tap into collective collegial experience in an appreciative inquiry way.

Are there opportunities for further development in this area that you have identified as a result of your own experience as a learner in the ONL course and of your engagement in this topic?

Maybe just a reflection on the ONL webinar with Dr. Robin Kay and his guide for busy online educators. I think it was really a great summary and resource for online educators. There is, though, the challenge in offering a 330 pages book to busy educators. So definitely the combination of a one hour webinar linked to the online resource is helpful. Then of course, if the webinar is more or less a presentation than it might just add as a sort of interactive table of contents. Recording the webinar sessions on top of that is inviting me to freely prioritize other urgent things, adding the ‘ have to watch the webinar later on’ task to my ever tighter time schedule, leaving me busier than ever 🙂

So the challenge may lie in getting teachers to come to the webinar or workshop in the first place. With an increasing supply of resources this might get more and more difficult even within a course. Our way of addressing that was to specifically ask for questions aforehand that are perceived problematic and then narrow the subject down to what is needed specifically and be very concrete. Could this be an idea for the ONL webinars?

ONL221 is an online course on open networked learning. These reflections are part of the course assignment. This one is on topic three– Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

Suggested topics for reflection

-An occasion when real collaborative learning took place, that moved your own thinking forward

My own thinking on collaborative learning was moved forward by experiencing and co-creating a couple of online art of hosting events during the pandemic. There are enough resources online to dive into the framework of art of hosting (AoH) or participatory leadership and getting in touch with this global network of practitioners so I will only mention some things I found helpful:

The fourfold practice is a way of summarizing what is needed for meaningful conversations: To be present, to participate, to host and to co-create something. Especially, the focus on having all those practices together and the wording of practice made this valuable to me. It needs to be practiced, you never stop doing it. Especially, the host yourself to become present part felt important. To me it contains the questions of how do I feel, what do I need, what can I contribute, what do I assume whenever I enter a conversation as participant or host. These ideas seem to resonate with the ONL community approach as well, participation is one practice, facilitation another and sharing as a third. It is not clear, though, if each ONL groups self organisation of their tasks is seen as practicing the facilitation role. This on the other hand is an explicit design feature of art of hosting workshops.

The Cynefin framework is another corner stone in art of hosting and it can help to take the focus away from mere problem solving to asking instead: What kind of system are we working in? This is especially important when we think of conversational spaces and learning spaces as complex systems rather than mere simple or complicated systems. There might not be best practices and we might therefore want to try other approaches then we are used to.

The principles of process design put forward by the art of hosting community is expressed as a series of breaths, which, I think, is a nice way of saying that aliveness could be seen as a key quality for conversational design. They also emphasize the role of harvest and the underlying purpose of convening as the invisible leader in the room.

The real life experience then came during the pandemic that brought a group of very experienced practitioners online where I had been for ten years and more. It became a wonderful experience to learn from each other what is needed for good conversations to emerge and how it could be accomplished online. The difference in experience and a shared purpose made it easy to stay in a constant practice, in an ongoing exchange on our learning journey. So for the ONL course I wanted to both see what could be brought from AoH to ONL and also vice versa, i.e. what could ONL mean for the AoH community. The latter may not be evident before after the course, tough.

Bringing som AoH to ONL

For this weeks topic it is Michelas and my turn to invite pbl group 7 into collaboration space. Our idea is to make our online meetings a hosted space where we can experiment safely with a couple of formats and ideas that are influenced by the art of hosting and liberating structures communities. The idea is to have all members included and engaged and to be part of decision making. If you’d like a scaffolding for the fish model in conversational space. The challenge is of course to convey some of the principles and experiences to carry over from what is a longer process to something as short as four one hour meetings.

We also felt that the asynchronous task in between meetings is put way too much work load on everybody, given twice a week synchronous meetings and a couple of other meeting and webinar offerings in the course, not to talk of blog requirements.

Another principle for our planning was to ask what is the minimal requirement to fullfil a given purpose with regards to technology. In plain words, no new tools to stress members of the group that already were busy keeping up with what has been introduced unless it provides some extra benefit.

As a principle for planning we use a variant of design storyboards as described in a liberating structure as a means of arriving at the never host alone principle in online settings.

Meeting one – the divergent opening

Here we invite our group to the playground – come as you are no need to prepare. We start the meeting with a check in, the circle way. Even though we think, we already had something of that shared responsibility that is intended by this method in the group, we thought it might be a good idea to point to a body of knowledge and experience that gives easy access to a design that fosters a change of perspective, a couple of principles and guidelines that create a structure around a shared responsibility for holding the conversational space between ourselves. The questions we invited to check in with was twofold: How do I feel today and what am I curious about in today’s meeting?

The wicked question game enters the space by having everyone write down a question that comes to their mind from reading the scenario of this topic. Hopefully it is something that really matters to them. In the game you are to help each other finding an even deeper, more helpful, clearer, improved version of one’s questions. By design, you practice also your hosting capabilities, i.e. to sense what is needed in conversation space where only questions are allowed, no propositions or good advice. The only questions allowed part normally triggers other parts of you brains and opens up for new and different perspectives. It is also intented to learn that using everyones’ experience and knowledge may help us in our quests.

A debriefing and lookout concludes the meeting.

Meeting two – the emergent groan zone

We think from the end: What is it that I and we want to harvest from our work during this topic? This is much like the fish concept – you bring in both individual and collective outcome possibilities. Everyone is asked to think of possible outcomes that are relevant to them and bring one idea to this meeting.

Established in meeting one we will start with our ritual of a check in to invite everyone into the presence of the conversation.

We then do a trojka coaching format to experience another variant of tapping into the collective wisdom of our group based on the ideas each of us brings to the table. In itself, we believe this format is highly collaborative and adds to the repertoire of conversational design tools we all can make us of in our meetings. In our specific context the purpose is to also use it to see if there are emerging patterns that we can focus on for the remaining two sessions. We thus leave it open for the group process to make sense, individually and collectively, to decide on the intended harvest. Harvest is another art of hosting term that means something more than documentation or report. It implies that it is something that has to be sown, watered and taken care of and also that it helps us to grow further in our understanding and in our taking next steps.

To help harvesting the results from our trio conversations we suggest a harvesting template to remind us of two different dimensions of individual/collective and tangible/intangible possible outcomes.

Meeting three and four – converging

The collective story harvest we arrived at in session three is a format that corresponded well to both scenario suggestions in this topic , i.e. the one on personal learning experience and also to stimulate listening and giving back gifts to the story teller as a means of strengthening relationships in our group. The listening perspectives we drew from the previous meetings’ harvest and adding some open free form to it. The choice of collective story harvest seemed therefore also motivated by the larger process perspective.

By this time, we felt we had offered very much structure and simply wanted to invite the group to a collective visual harvest much as in our topic two but this time more focussing on the process. This is standard procedure in AoH visual harvest practices and it had already emerged earlier on so it may have served the purpose of ritualizing our group practices .

Personal learning

I found the practices of the AoH and liberating structures formats suited the topic fairly well. Maybe more care could be given to not trying to squeeze formats and concepts into a shorter time frame than what is recommended by experience. The ‘art’ part lies presumably in making the choices that suit the whole learning process. This may amount to not choosing certain formats or activities whenever the time is not available. So maybe to paraphrase

God, grant me the serenity to accept the constraints I cannot change,
courage to chose and adapt the formats I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.^[1]

Lack of time may also explain the popularity of tiny structures like chatterfall, or the unicorn scale of greatness that are self explaining, need less contextual adaptation and can thus be reused easily. And as with studies of reuse of open educational resources it would be interesting to investigate further into reuse of these open conversational practices in order to if other than time constrains may present obstacles.

So maybe for course organizers it could be interesting to investigate

How a participatory framework like the Art of Hosting could be a valuable resource in providing open conversational practices to ONL?

ONL221 is an online course on open networked learning. These reflections are part of the course assignment. This one is on topic two – sharing and openness .

Suggestions for reflections
– openness in your own practice

“You could be observant to have your talking time more evenly distributed …” one of our facilitators mentioned when we had a short evaluation around ‘group work – so far’ in our open networked learning course, ONL 221, which is about open networked learning and build on a problem based learning approach. Being one of the more talkative members I confess, I had my share in that. So maybe an easy way to handle this is just to keep my mouth shut and listen or blame the facilitator/moderator of the session to be the one responsible for this. Then again, I came across the concept of liberating structures during the pandemic and it really got me into thinking about what formats for conversation we chose and how that might affect things like talking time or inclusion.

This weeks topic is, sharing and openness. And my reflection starts just here: What difference would it make if practices of liberating structures were used in comparison with the facilitator structured approach used in the ONL course?

There is guidance as to how each group should do their group work, what outcomes are expected from individuals and also a description of what the facilitators role is in the course. The impression you get is that even the role of facilitation is a learning journey that takes place at another parallell level of the course and room is given to the influences that might be brought into that role. The actual micro-structure of each conversation/meeting is then open to whoever takes the lead for a specific session, both for facilitators but also participant moderators. The term micro-structure refers here to how the collectors of liberating structures, Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless use the word, meaning “smaller structures that influence our interactions with other people”. There are 33 different structures , more evolving constantly, that are described as patterns that can easily be applied by everyone. Combining different structures into strings is making the whole concept flexible and qualify as a pattern language.

Lipmanowicz/McCandless argue that most of us are familiar with the big five conventional micro-structures that either are over-controlled such as presentation, managed discussion and status update or under-controlled as in brain-storming and open discussion. The resulting interaction is thus either relatively predetermined and rather unidirectional or reflecting other unwanted patterns of conversation as for instance unevenly distributed talking time. Liberating structures are – on the contrary – all aimed at creating a more including pattern for participation.

Given the promise of an inclusive outcome of conversations by design through liberating structures and noticing that this also is a wished for result of the course guidelines for facilitation I think it could be an interesting question for course organizers to ask:

Could experimenting with liberating structures be a helpful impulse for  ONL course facilitators?

Digital Suicide

ONL221 is an online course on open networked learning. These reflections are part of the course assignment. This one is on topic one – online participation and digital literacy.

Suggested themes for reflection

– who are you as an individual in the digital age, and what characterizes your journey so far

“Yes, we were all wondering, what had happened and where you were?” Alastair remembers, when chatting after an ONL webinar lately. I had committed digital suicide, meaning I deleted all my social media accounts sometime early 2016. Why? Well, I had been enthusiastically online since 1994 as a teacher and learning designer and almost entirely in virtual meetings from 2009 on. I considered myself to be one of those early adopters and quite good at predicting the next big thing out there. So I had my online and offline identity built around some virtual spider man idea, or so. Countless the number of facebook friends and linkedIn and other bodiless connections that made up my personal and professional learning network. Digital resident and literate and whatever concepts that are presented here – didn’t help – I digidied – death by stroke of keyboard!

And yes, there were some problems in the physical world as well … but eventually they disappeared.

Online Zombiehood

This is not an advanced AI program writing. It is just my own digital zombie, the digitally living dead me. Dead as in death by mindless clicks and likes and endless flows of subscriptions to every perturbation in the ever expanding infoverse. A reminder of information entropy as a constant lethal risk. Life as the desired state of being, wanting the infoverse to be but another part of a hospitable total ecosystem, keeping us alive. Both the impulses are there all the time and there is work involved and I am not sure if this blogging thing will serve the living path …

ONL and BlogAngst

I attend this course as an institutional learner to experience it and to understand a bit of its dynamics. The ONL model may also serve as a prototype for collaborative learning across higher ed institutions in Sweden which is another motivation for me to attend. Also, I am part of the Art of Hosting (AoH) community, which is a practitioners community interested in hosting and harvesting conversations and work that matter. Since ONL presents itself as “A Course, A community, An Approach” I think it might be interesting to see whether they could complement each other.

Week one and two of the course seem straightforward and in line with what we at Karlstad University recommend our teachers: Create some psychological safety and orientation around the technical and social environment. Is seems important to built this kind of spaces as a precondition for people to open up and trust each other. As part of this endeavor, there is some structure provided concerning both expected outcomes and artifacts like group contract and fish model.

But then this blog requirement enters the scene and I sense an aura of BlogAngst (from german Angst (fear))is almost tangible in the in-between space of the course. All sorts of reasons, why this is something that cannot be done come to my mind. Especially if you aren’t a blogger, like me. Anyway, it seems obvious that this is not only my problem, since an extra session on ‘how to not be stressed about blogging’ is incorporated in the course. I attended it and this leads me to a first recommendation to the course organizers:

Make the John Weston session an early invitation and resource in the course. It was well structured, intended to just take you by the blogging hand and lead you a bit on the way. Psychological safety and caring par excellence. Thanks John.

Of course, if you – like me- cannot write your blog directly after that session then the magic of the John moment may fade away. So another idea then is:

Why not invite to pairblogging? We do it in many other contexts, think-pair-share, 1-2-4-all etc, so it could be a helpful dynamic and safe structure for the blog-averse of us to create momentum.

And also – if it is the wording of ‘blog’ that seems to create this kind of problems it might be worth asking if

simply a written reflection is asked for to be shared with other course participants. 

Thanks for arranging this course!