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In order to organize the preferences, Bianca draws a Venn Diagram and then arranges the pizza toppings according to the diagram.

It is through design that teachers set the stage for a community of inquiry, but it is through the facilitation and experience with that design that the community is actually established.

imagine the design as being the outline of a painting.  As the community is established and evolves its members fill the outline with color.  Together they create a picture of learning.  The more active and engaged the participants, the more the picture will evolve.  Ultimately, my goal is for the community to paint a picture with detail, depth, subtlety, and nuance.  I want my students to take the picture with them after the course and bring it into a new community and continue to share and develop it.   In turn, I will take the picture I am left with at the end of the course and look for pieces where my design succeeded in encouraging color with detail, depth, subtlety and nuance as well as pieces that maybe weren’t colored in as much or as well.  I will adapt my design based on the influence of the community in an attempt to maximize its potential to create a high quality picture of learning.

The premise of this framework is that higher-order learning is best supported in a community of learners engaged in critical reflection and discourse.

We need to be safely, appropriately, and powerfully using technologies like videoconferencing to engage students and connect them with other novice as well as expert-learners more than we are in most classrooms today relative to the cost of fixed-room videoconferencing equipment. I had a conversation yesterday with a first grade teacher who said she would LOVE to do videoconferencing like this, but doesn’t know where to start and doesn’t have anyone to help her in her school building.

Despite the fact that this project engaged students on many levels and taught them story structure, characterization, use of dialogue, and exposition, it was jettisoned last year because of the national shift to the Common Core. It was replaced with an eight-page (for sixth graders!) research project.

It's bad writing.  It's always been bad writing.  With the Common Core Standards designed to shift the way we teach students to think, read, and write, this outdated writing tradition must end.  If you're teaching it--stop it.  If your son, daughter, niece, or nephew (or a young person you care about) is learning it--prepare to engage with the teacher to end  it.

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.

The posting below looks at best practices for teaching online.

Why is presence so important in the online environment? When faculty actively interact and engage students in a face-to-face classroom, the class evolves as a group and develops intellectual and personal bonds. The same type of community bonding happens in an online setting if the faculty presence is felt consistently.

by its nature informal, emotional, full of humorous quips, and in a word, "chatty" (see Exhibit 5 for examples of chats). Given the one-line limits to chat text, interruptions abound. Chatters move on while someone else responds to something said a few lines back. Although the chat is hardly recognizable as an academic discussion, it can help generate a vital engagement with the text that students then transfer to the message board

"When using active learning students are engaged in more activities than just listening. They are involved in dialog, debate, writing, and problem solving, as well as higher-order thinking, e.g., analysis, synthesis, evaluation."

Despite the many educational projects and programs now being funded and offered, practically no effort is being made to create and implement a better, more future-oriented education for all our kids.

This distinction is critical because one can change almost everything about the "system" -- the schools, the leaders, the teachers, the number of hours and days of instruction and so forth -- and still not provide an education that interests our students and gets them deeply engaged in their own learning,

peop

it isn't about the technology

It is about the informational affordances and cultural practices which have taken shape around the computer and other interactive technologies.

Interaction alone, however, is insufficient to create a positive social dynamic in the online classroom.

Research demonstrates that the integration of verbal and non-verbal immediacy communication behaviors lets instructors move from mere interaction to authentic intimacy and interpersonal closeness.

an instructor’s understanding of interaction and immediacy dynamics will affect the nature and quality of communication in the online learning environment.