Fishbowl Seminar Instructions

Fishbowl seminars. I dont know who thought them up but I like them. I keep having to cook up a description of them, find images of the set-up etc. So I thought I'd put it here, partly to make things easy for myself - not because it necessarily has anything to do with networked learning... except that the first place I encountered it was in the Aalborg NLC.
So I've made this image (yes I am colourblind). 

And these are the instructions for my setting - tweak to suit :)

This is a way of a managing a group conversation. It needs at enough people to form a decent circle, plus three. So 10 is a good number but I have seen it done successfully with many more than this (see https://flic.kr/p/c8iyWj for example).

Preparation:

You will need to rearrange the room so that there is a circle of chairs around three chairs in the middle. In smaller fishbowl seminars, it's good to avoid someone sitting directly behind someone else, especially the 'main speaker'. 

You will need about 20 sheets of A4 paper and lots of post-it notes (the number of members, squared).

Divide the time available by the number of members to find out how long each round will be. Allow for a couple of minutes for 'handover'. 

Method:

Three people are in the middle of a circle of chairs. One is for the 'presenter', the other is a tutor, and  another 3rd person - the latter two kick off with questions.

If anyone wants to speak, they have to take one of the seats in the middle. They do this by rising from their seat and tapping the shoulder of the tutor or 3rd person to replace them in the middle. 

 

Notes: 

It is good to give the people sitting around the centre something significant to do so that they are actively listening and contributing even if they do not enter the centre. For example,

1. Each round, appoint a different person to keep the time. They should announce when 2 minutes are left on the current round. 
2. Ensure that each person around the outside has at least one postit note. They are asked to write some brief (it can only be brief!), anonymised feedback on the postit. Sharing email addresses can happen a different way! At the end of a round, the postits for that round are stuck to a single a4 sheet.

Probably you have suggestions which could enhance the above, if so, please share :)

Networked Learning as a pedagogy again

I can't quite escape from the ideas I was talking about in 2008. Media choice and the pedagogy of and around that choice impacts behaviour and somehow we're liable to miss that.
Scenario: Evaluation. You have a large class of students (say 200) and you want to get a good response-rate to the routine end-of-module evaluation. The organisation would quite like this process to cost nothing at all. So, from paper-based, or perhaps optical mark read forms, the organisation has moved to online evaluations. This has coincided with a dramatic drop in response-rates. The choice of media has distanced the student from anything but the slightest amount of pedagogic influence over them (a paper just published refers to this kind of thing as 'pedagogic distance' - see Westberry and Franken 2015 - I think it is a massive issue). Even in a large lecture setting, if a lecturer hands out paper forms and requests students to complete them, the students are likely to comply. This is likely to do with the social form of the lecture as an event within which students immediately cede control to the person managing the session. Once out of the lecture, the spell is broken and all kinds of things come between the student and the online form.
Given that it is not very manageable to troop them all off to an IT room, unless you have the facility and could tie the evaluation in with some other desirable learning opportunity.
You could try an audience response system but that would be expensive and quite clumsy to administer. Apart from anything else, an evaluation with more than a few summary questions is going to feel like an imposition on the students and would, in my view, be an abuse of the lecturer's pedagogic power. There have been many discussions about the issue of students using their mobiles in lectures.
I suggested projecting a very large QR Code that points to the online form. Google's URL shortener serves up a QR Code and still works even though it gets a bit blurry when enlarged. [Note of caution - check URL's unless you can absolutely trust the source - perhaps use something like https://scanurl.net - good to use a checker that looks harder than just what's at the other end of your click - thanks to Martha for suggesting this edit 😁)

Any student with a smartphone ought to be able to follow the link. Clearly that is fantasy. It would be a good idea to warn the students in advance or at least to ask them to ensure they have or know where to find a QR Code Scanner app.
Even if they don't complete the form there and then, at least their browser is at the right page and they may go on to complete it later.
So it is hoped that merely by using the lecture setting to display the QR Code and allocating a few minutes to complete the form will increase response rates. Whether this will work after the novelty factor wears off, and what proportion of students who are not capable of scanning the code will feel disenfranchised and possibly put in a worse evaluation than they might have otherwise...!!! As they say, that's an empirical question...
But has the lecturer's action of introducing the QR Code in this scenario promoted connections? Is that an example of networked learning pedagogy in action? The definition says nothing about having students having to be learning at a distance...
Then there's the whole thing about the way that my role here means that I get to sit in meetings and try and join the things that I hear with the 'stuff I know' to come up with useful suggestions. Its serendipity. If learning technologists want to influence learning and teaching practice, they may have to sit in and tune in to yet more meetings.

Westberry, Nicola, and Margaret Franken. “Pedagogical Distance: Explaining Misalignment in Student-Driven Online Learning Activities Using Activity Theory.” Teaching in Higher Education 20, no. 3 (April 3, 2015): 300–312. doi:10.1080/13562517.2014.1002393.

Design for learning

People talk about 'blended learning' as if it is something worth making a distinct point about. The only thing it is distinct from is 'undesigned' learning... where the 'instructor' (in cases where there is one) has, for whatever reason, not designed it (enough). The T P sea K framework of M ! s h r a & K o e h l € r is, in my view, a typology that introduces unhelpful distinctions (feel free to google it, I'm not linking to it from here ;). The T(=tech) needs to become part of what we do as instructors in the way that it is when we learn to drive or act generally in the world. For me, T  P sea K is basically P - pedagogy.

pensive moi - because every post needs a picture and I was feeling low on creativity

I tweeted a link the other day, the heavily critical one by New Media in Monash. Within the hour, Dr K o e h l € r had favourited it and followed me, little me. That was simply too keen for my liking. I tried to rationalise this as I checked him out... As I viewed his 'trap' from the inside, it occurred to me that I still had a chance to get out. Happy to say, clearly I did escape. What I saw in there disturbed me though. K o e h l € r's actions on Twitter and the decor of his web presence meant just one thing: money. Someone is making money out of these acronyms. It doesn't matter if the theory is shaky, just like the learning styles stuff, there is good money to be made and people will buy it, walking away satisfied customers, thanking you very much. We might take a generous view of all this and say, well, they have to make a living somehow. But the thing that worries me the most is the effect on education research and theory in general. T P sea K is just P. That's the beating heart of it. It's not a new insight and provides us with another niche theory that does not hold much promise for building meaningfully upon. What it has is the potential for meme-like caché amongst those interested enough to care about teaching but in too much of a hurry to really care about building theory with greater explanatory power (e.g. Policy makers with the power to dictate various curricula). So, with more than a glance towards LCT, we get yet another confusing segment along the horizontal plane of the theory landscape (which now resembles a massive sprawling shanty town - sorry this simile is not quite as PC as I would normally align with) instead of something which genuinely has potential to build and be built upon, advancing theory AND practice in education. 
Here is a design principle I think has some reflective power to positively influence practice:

"design for learning networks will normally be improved if attention is paid to the little things that allow participants' activity to shift smoothly between the digital and the material." p270

If you cant do pedagogy then get some help or give up now.

Goodyear, Peter, and Lucila Carvalho. “Synthesis.” In The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks, 259–76. New York ; Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

CEQ and group-based networked learners

Following my chat with Andrew again a week last Friday, I finally got around to looking at Community Equity (CEQ), which plugs into Confluence quite nicely. I wrote a bit about my ideal VLE before and this post is about thinking whether CEQ could fit some of those requirements.
I detect a growing consensus that group-based activity and the dialogue it promotes is gaining ground at many levels of education (I've been reading Littleton and Howe's book about educational dialogue).
When the group has divided up its work and separated, how can their activity be measured? Networked learning is about 'promoting connections' and this needs to happen in the minds and lives of people, not just by designing engaging learning materials, or even a highly relevant and stimulating learning activity. CEQ can incentivise social network activity by making that activity transparent. Contributions to a wiki in terms of edits, comments, bookmarks, ratings, etc., can paint a fine-grained picture of a person's online effort towards the group endeavour.
Perhaps that's enough. Perhaps awarding marks towards a degree classification may only distort the learner's focus, reducing them to a special case of myspace/facebook piracy. There's work to be done on defining performance levels, even if adopting the simple 'pass or fail' system, where a certain level of activity would get students over the finishing line. Hopefully, by then, they'd have become networked learners.
Of course, this is still very formative. I have no idea if we can bring CEQ together with automated 'space' creation/population, based on student information system data... but I'm warming to the idea of a pilot.
The other thing that slightly chills me is the whole development lifecycle of open source software.... but that's for another post...
Here's a video about CEQ...

See also http://kenai.com/projects/community-equity

Commentary on 'blogging as a tool for reflection and learning'

Thanks to @amcunningham for RT -

great! RT @jilltxt: A video lecture I recorded for HiB about using blogging in learning is up at Virclass.net http://bit.ly/4zaUUZ

I really believe in the power or writing for 'an' audience, I see that Dr Jill (Walker Rettberg) has been able to marshal a lot of factors that make her students more likely to engage and 'get' the personal benefits of blogging:

1. The course is about digital culture (4:52). It used to be that all the 'success' stories about learning technology came out of those who taught Ed Tech MSc's. These days it's the cultural anthropologists... But the point is that the activity in question must be directly in line with the students' view of their short and long term learning trajectory. I really doubt if my nurses see themselves as bloggers, as much as I know they'd benefit from it.
   
2. Jill has regular and easy access to class with computers.
3. While the students are under Jill's pedagogic control, she gets them writing.
4. The students have well defined well designed learning activities (write down one thing you learned today, google a term and post a link to it) giving them a meaningful reason to engage
5. She integrates blogging tightly with her teaching (online out of class and in lectures)
6. 'The most important thing' was when she modelled 'good' networked learning activity.
7. A critical mass of students engage with the concept and each other.
8. 'Experts' outwith the confines of the programme comment on student's posts which accentuates the awareness of audience, further authenticating the activity: "there, I told you Stephen Downes was real" - Do you have a ready pool of bloggers in your discipline?
   

The implicit theory here is cognitive apprenticeship, which I'm a big fan of. These students are being given a clear trajectory in to a learning community - small wonder if it 'works'. Beware trying this at home unless you too can tick most of the above boxes. 'Good luck'? Not really, just good alignment.
One good video link deserves another: check out Neil Selwyn at seminar.net - also in Norway ;-) (ah... the land of my fathers...)