Group items tagged

they would instead reflect the perspective or world view of some organizer telling them what their objectives should be, what they should learn, what counts as success.

Participants, for example, could experience the course as a series of lectures, and some did, but many skipped the experience. Others treated the course as project-based, creating artifacts and tangible products. Others viewed the course as conversation and community, focused on interaction with other participants.

We were, for example, criticized for offering lectures, because it did not follow good constructivist pedagogy; our response was that connectivism is not constructivism,

and that it was up to those who preferred to learn through constructivist methods to do so, but not appropriate that they would require that all other participants learn in the same way.

Openness also applies to the content of the course, and here the idea is that we want to encourage participants not only to share content they received from the course with each other (and outside the course), but also to bring into the course content they obtained from elsewhere.

Learning requires perception, not only of the thing, but also of its opposite.

In a connectivist course, for example, lurkers are seen as playing as equally important and valuable role as active participants

We also know that there are plenty of low- to no-cost learning options available to people on a daily basis, from books on nearly every academic topic at the local library and on-the-job experience, to the television programming on the National Geographic, History and Discovery channels. If learning can and does take place everywhere, there has to be a specific reason that people would be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years of their life to get it from one particular source like a college. There is, of course, and again it’s the credential, because no matter how many years I spend diligently tuned to the History Channel, I’m simply not going to get a job as a high-school history teacher with “television watching” as the core of my resume, even if I both learned and retained far more information than I ever could have in a series of college history classes.

s new technologies seep into the classroom, it will be easier to measure what students actually learn. That will "make universities more accountable for what they produce," Dr. Crow says.

Using a common visual anchor (e.g., a common diagram) can help people maintain joint visual attention.

Sharing operates on two levels: sharing common goals and sharing ideas.

Many college students dislike group projects. Some of this is naïve egoism and an unwillingness to compromise

Collaboration requires a great deal of turn-taking coordination.

It can be useful to establish collaborative structures and rules.

primary reason for collaborating is that people bring different ideas to the table. The first four ingredients—joint attention, listening, sharing, and coordinating—support the exchange of information. The fifth ingredient is understanding why people are offering the information they do. This often goes beyond what speakers can possibly show and say (see Chapter S). People need to understand the point of view behind what others are saying, so they can interpret it more fully. This requires perspective taking. This is where important learning takes place, because learners can gain a new way to think about matters. It can also help differentiate and clarify one’s own ideas. A conflict of opinions can enhance learning (Johnson & Johnson, 2009).

An interesting study on perspective taking (Kulkarni, Cambre, Kotturi, Bernstein, & Klemmer, 2015) occurred in a massive open online course (MOOC) with global participation. In their online discussions, learners were encouraged to review lecture content by relating it to their local context. The researchers placed people into low- or high-diversity groups based on the spread of geographic regions among participants. Students in the most geographically diverse discussion groups saw the highest learning gains, presumably because they had the opportunity to consider more different perspectives than geographically uniform groups did