Månad: november 2020

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Topic 4

During this journey a teacher pointed out that that “cognitive presence relates to what you talk about now and social presence is related to communities and sense of belonging”. I think this is important to keep in mind, although I thought the topic would only relate to different design tools and how to use them for adequate purposes.

Then I’ve realized that topic 4 is just as much about how to gain presence and confidence in the online environment. A Spanish colleague of mine said once: “What you expect the students to do you have to experience yourself first.” In fact, being a student in this course is a great experience to me, I have seen how easily communication is lost and how hard it is to be concentrated all the time: what the teacher thinks is very clear does not have to be clear on the other end of the line:) And if my well prepared powerpoint presentation is shown as full screen on my computer, this does not imply that the students see the same or see the presentation at all! I have noticed this already (sometimes, when I’ve told students to read out loud a short text from the ppt they start searching for the document before they get into action) but not reflected on the problem. So from now on I have to be aware of what kind of units (phone, computer…) and settings the students use and I have to be clear about what setting would be the best in order to see what is going to be treated during the session (and less worried about how I look in the camera:):)).

When Dr. Marti Cleveland pointed out that we have to be present and share ourselves as persons I did not quite understand what she meant. I have heard it before… but now it is clear to me that being present and personal in an online environment is a different challenge from being the same on campus where all of us perceive the same field. Furthermore, it is important to invite the students to be present, not only by adequate tools but also by underscoring the importance of being part of the activities. An example for this is when I asked them to write a few words (anonymously) about how they perceived my methods and I was surprised to read words like: great sessions, very interesting and different from what I’ve learnt before, engaging…

On the other hand, the lack of being part of an activity was something I experienced last time we met in the PBL group. Since I had forgot the password to Miro I could not participate in the same way as my peers and had to sit there watching what was being done… It was my own fault of course, but now, reflecting upon it, I’ve understood that presence makes learning and teaching meaningful.

This is all for now folks, next time I’ll talk about the articles I’ve read on this topic.

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Topic 3

After two inspiring weeks of seminars with my peers on the topic “learning in communities” it’s time to write a few words. All the peers of our group are excellent participants and it has been a wonderful experience to lead the work on this topic together with Stephanie and with support from our facilitators. I think we’ve done exactly what is expected in a community: everyone contributes in different but always constructive ways to reach the aim. Therefore we’ve shared a lot of different aspects of the topic such as definitions, ideas, reflections, digital tools that may be useful for learning together – and ended up with listening to the song “We are here” by Alicia Keys! (which associates to community… I found it inspired by the list of songs that Stephanie passed over to us all via whatsapp) and place our final presentation on the onl202 page.

In the beginning of the process my role was a kind of secretary of our google-doc and since my peers knew more than me about how to handle it, I learnt a lot about this digital resource. Once again thanks to all my peers of pbl-group 6!:)

Our first task was to define differences and resemblances between the concepts “network” and “community”. Stephanie did a great job producing word clouds where our ideas could be seen. In this way we all contributed from the beginning. Then, after the interesting lecture by Kay Oddone, we talked about the main issues: how to engage students and make them see the advantages of connected learning and how to encourage them to participate in a constructive and meaningful way.

In my opinion, the ways of contributing in our group has helped me to understand how the student groups may work: all members of a group should participate but it is important to remember that they participate in different ways. The important issue for the teacher is to construe tasks and exercises that “force” everyone to engage and in which different skills are relevant. In short, the key word for the teacher is “meaningful” and this sense of meaning has to be communicated to the students.

In this way, the former “gap” between campus and online communities is less significant. But I’m not implying that campus activities are less meaningful, I just say that I have to reflect a lot more upon design to make meaningful tasks for online learning. In short, meaningful work online is also meaningful on campus but the opposite is not always the case. An example for this is something that happened in my class (Spanish for beginners) a few days ago. The students were supposed to practice a telephone conversation. If they had done that on campus it would probably have been by reading or traducing a text from Swedish into Spanish. Now, as an online activity, I construed some comments of the conversation in Spanish and the students had to invent the other half of the conversation in a coherent way. This task engaged them all to work in zoom breakout rooms and by the end of the session they presented different conversations depending on their skills and level of Spanish. All of them looked so happy:) and to me this was a great pedagogical and didactic reward!

During the process one of my peers shared an article about online learning that I found interesting:

https://hbsp.harvard.edu/inspiring-minds/online-learning-can-still-be-social

Then, Brindley, Blasche & Walti (2009) propose that “rather than focus on the grading of collaborative group projects, instructors should incorporate a variety of instructional strategies to improve the quality of group collaboration and to increase the likelihood of student participation.” These strategies are: 

  1. Facilitate learner readiness for group work and provide scaffolding to build skills,
  2. Establish a healthy balance between structure (clarity of task) and learner autonomy (flexibility of task),
  3. Nurture the establishment of learner relationships and sense of community,
  4. Monitor group activities actively and closely,
  5. Make the group task relevant for the learner,
  6. Choose tasks that are best performed by a group,
  7. Provide sufficient time.

I read the article on the onl202 page. These strategies will be kept in mind for my classes and I think they’ve been a useful orientation for the work on topic 3 in the pbl group.

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Reflection week

The week for reflections has already passed, filled with examinations and teaching. Then some time for reflections on the two first topics and reading my peers’ blogs – which I found interesting – but unfortunately no time for further reading of articles.

Regarding topic 1 I think this is an ongoing process of didactic and pedagogical reflections: how do I engage the students in studying and maintain their motivation, and how do I make the subject interesting (the latter is important since I’m not an expert on linguistics, rather Spanish modern literature). I think this course has provided a lot of positive aspects for online teaching, especially since I now experience what it is like to be an online student. Now it’s a lot easier to understand why the students don’t get all the information and why it takes time to learn Spanish grammar. My use of open resources has widened, both during the webinars with my students and through the learning platform and I realize that open resources constitute a significant part of my teaching. Therefore, my attitude concerning topic 2 has changed: from resisting OER and seeing it as a totally irrelevant issue to regarding it as a necessary and natural part of teaching. Everything changes – even my attitudes – and, who knows, in short time may be most teachers and universities are connected to OER.

Looking forward to topic 3!