Blog #3, Week 5

I hope the old saying that goes, “better late, than never” will apply here, between some technical difficult with my internet connection and some family health problems I am very late with this blog. Please forgive me.

Question 1
One way to facilitate successful online collaborative learning is to consider the type and complexity of the task and to develop appropriate guidance and strategies. How would you go about doing this?

First you must decide which types of tasks the students are taking on.

If you are trying to provide guidelines for online discussions, the instructor must prompt the students to ask questions, provide explanations, make clarifications, and negotiate meanings, share experience, make inferences, and justifications. By doing this you will prompt students to think critically and direct attentions to important issues. It also encourages active interactions. I feel that through this class this is done both by the weekly discussions and the blogging. I will admit it is much more difficult to try and think of thought provoking questions myself.

If your goal is to provide guidelines for problem-solving tasks you must guide students to engage in cognitive processes such as representing the problem, developing solutions, constructing arguments, and monitoring and evaluations. An example that I have been involved in another class, is the making of teaching guides for the Ayore’ Indians from Bolivia, the instructor presented the class with a problem and we as a class, divided ourselves up into different sections and attacked the problem. We have all posted by way of message board and have collaborated together even though we have never seen each other face to face.

If your goal is guidelines for decisions-making tasks, you should direct students’ interactions in areas of negotiation meaning, reaching consensus, and making justifications.


Question 2

Chapter 10, talks about the Internet being built around key technology design features. What are these, what do they do and what types of approaches will be popular and meaningful for students?

Key technology design features include robustness, decentralization, and open communication. Robustness means that the internet was designed and distributed that could survive attack, failure, or sabotage of any particular part and still function as a meaningful communication system. IT also means that you have the ability to communicate from different locations, using different devices. In terms of decentralization, it means that there are many different connections with no single one being more important than any other. I find this very interesting in the fact that if one system is down, then the information will just find another route. The fact that the internet is an open system means that no one owns or controls it. I had never thought of who owns the internet before, I thought it profound when the author compared the internet to a living organism. Open communication means that the internet is open to the flow of material.

I agree with the author of this chapter in the fact he states that e-learning should always be constructivist in approach. I believe that learning is a collaborative event and should be shared between the instructor, student and peers.