Group items tagged

Participants also highlighted positive aspects related to support received. Respondents to the PLENK2010 survey were appreciative of how the facilitators led without directing and also of the work and engagement provided by the facilitators. Thus, teaching presence, especially exemplified through course design and the type of facilitation, turned out to have a powerful effect on student perceptions of support, inclusiveness, and overall satisfaction with the course. The participants valued greatly the autonomy on connections and participation in networks: “We were given free choice and allowed autonomy about our ways to connect and participate in the network. I greatly value this approach to learning and working together.”

table, trusted, and valued, and where people can access and interact with resources and each other. The new roles that the teacher as facilitator needs to adopt in networked learning environments include aggregating, curating, amplifying, modelling, and persistently being present in coaching or mentoring.

Using Synchronous Tools to Build Community in the Asynchronous Online Classroom

Synchronous tools can help humanize the classroom.

Setting up open office hours

Great teachers work on building a sense of community in their classrooms all year long

They understand that helping students build relationships with each other is a key to creating an optimal learning environment.

You can support children's relationships in many ways. Let students share about their hobbies, interests, and passions at Morning Meeting or in connection with academic topics or assignments

In contrast, a horse's or pigeon's eyes are angled away from each other and therefore provide an almost panoramic view of the world (Fig. 3.3 ).

Rapport is a key characteristic of human interactio

their students is a vital ingredient in the success of any lesson and in aiding students to learn.

One online instructor (Alley 1996) has described this changing pedagogical consciousness as an �instructional epiphany�.� Alley tells of a personal transformation, stimulated by online instruction, marked by two "milestones". First, he had to totally redesign his course to fit and leverage the new learning environment. Second, he had to rethink what he calls his �basic approach�: �As long as I held on to the traditional �sage-on-stage� style of teaching, I would keep reinventing ways for students to be a passive audience� (1996:51).� Similar changes in pedagogical belief and practice have been reported by other faculty who have taught web-based courses (Brown 1998; Jaffee 1997; Cremer 1998) as well as researchers who have interviewed online instructors (Frank 2000).�� There are clearly some �structural constraints� built into the virtual classroom ecology that make it difficult to implement traditional modes of delivery and, in this sense, almost force instructors to entertain active learning strategies. As Frank (2000) discovered in her study of online instructors, "All of the participants saw online learning as empowering for students. The most valuable benefits were the facilitation of active learning, critical thinking, collaboration, confidence, and lifelong learning habits. A common theme was the way in which the teacher is forced to give up the control that one has in a face-to-face environment and re-examine the traditional role of content deliverer".� Just as the physical classroom architecture imposes constraints on, and opportunities for, particular pedagogical practices, so too does the virtual classroom. John Seely Brown (2000) has described the environment of the world-wide-web as a �learning ecology� that is a self-organized evolving collection of cross-pollinating overlapping communities of interest.� Asynchronous web-based courses that include a discussion forum possess many of the same ecological features. All members of the class can receive and broadcast information at any time. This critical communication feature distinguishes the virtual classroom from prior forms of instructional technology.�� While instructors can mediate and guide, they cannot entirely control the flow of communication. Thus, instructor and student roles and relations are less hierarchical and more overlapping and interactive. These greater opportunities for participation can contribute to a greater diversity of opinion and perspective. It is hard work to establish these social dynamics in a physical classroom constrained by a fixed space, a designated time block, and trained inhibitions. The virtual classroom, in contrast, has the potential to establish new patterns of instructor and student interaction and, accordingly, different teaching and learning roles and practices (Girod and Cavanaugh 2001; Becker and Ravitz 1999). ��������� In making comparisons between the physical and virtual classroom, it is important to emphasize a cautionary caveat. The pedagogical ecology, be it a physical classroom or a virtual interface, cannot entirely determine a particular pedagogical practice or learning outcome. The pedagogical ecology offers opportunities and constraints that will shape and influence classroom dynamics and learning outcomes, but much will also depend on the principles informing, and the actual design of, the teaching and learning process (see Chamberlin 2001). The various practices that are employed in both a physical and a virtual classroom indicate the range of possibilities. However, if we believe that, for the purpose of student learning, active student engagement and interaction is preferable to the passive reception of information, we should consider the degree to which this principle is advanced or facilitated by the expanding virtual learning ecology.�

Sociological theories and concepts have an important role to play in analyzing and interpreting these developments. A central sociological proposition is that structural environments influence the social perceptions, roles, and relations of human actors.� As increasing numbers of students and faculty find themselves operating in virtual learning environments, we might also expect to find some changing instructional dynamics. More specifically, there are a number of questions worth exploring. What are the relationships between the technical, the social, and the pedagogical infrastructures?� How has the introduction of new instructional technologies influenced established pedagogical practices? How does the shift from a physical classroom to a virtual learning environment shape and reconfigure the social roles and relations among faculty and students? What consequences will these technologies have for developing pedagogical practices?

have less to do with the proven effectiveness of the particular practice than the desire to appear legitimate or conform to normative expectations.�

A child in the preoperational stage could not be taught to understand the liquid volume experiment; she does not possess the mental structure of a child in concrete operations.

acquisition of meta-cognition (thinking about thinking

assimilation

kids prefer Coke than water

should lead to a greater understanding of the content

There are many who resist change

To start with, education must be egalitarian and universal, unlike previous education, which was feudal and elitist: “So there is nothing left for us but just to apply the new system to every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation.” Such education will aid in the creation of a classless society: “All distinctions of classes … will be completely removed and vanish. In this way there will grow up among us, not popular education, but real German national education.”[75]

Real education must start by getting to the source of human nature. Education must exert “an influence penetrating to the roots of vital impulse and action.” Here was a great failing of traditional education, for it had relied upon and appealed to the student’s free will. “I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system.” Compulsion, not freedom, is best for students: On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied upon with confidence and certainty.[76]