Doing More Than Making Lists (Dennen – Networked Knowledge Activities Draft)

Considering our topic of ownership from Week 3, I wondered what the risks of blogging about this article and others that are drafts, in press or not published. That aside, I really connected with Dennen’s comment that students struggle with taking control over their learning. I know this was not the main focus of the article, but to me, it was what I kept thinking about while reading it. I have always tried to implement activities that encourage students to learn from each other. My go to activity is to split the class into groups and have them research a topic and then present it to the class and I act as the mediator, keep the class on track, add things they may have missed and clarify/correct anything they may have not gotten quite right. I figure that this is just as good as me teaching and if nothing else, at least each group has learned at least one thing (the item they researched) that class period. I often hear complaints the first few times when they are asked to do this, but then they get the hang of it. I hear them say comments like “you are the teacher, not us” or “I don’t know this stuff, that’s why I’m taking the class”. I attribute it to them being used to the structure of most of their education prior to this. They are used to just being fed information. I purposely give them vague instructions and tell them that in the “real world” their boss is not going to give them step by step detailed instructions and part of working (learning) is figuring things out along the way. It’s almost as if they are scared to be creative and to think outside the box. As Dennen says, they want to provide the “right answer” as if it is as simple as 2+2 and that there is only one correct response. I try to give them examples from my own work experience that show that my employer valued my creativity and critical thinking and preferred it over cut and dry projects. With the internet providing us with an answer to just about everything, it is important for them to bring something to the table that someone can’t simply look up. Of the six core networked knowledge activities, I most identified with being a collector and curator. I’m really great at finding articles and organizing them, but I rarely read them. I know that my collecting comes out in my teaching as I am always giving my students links to sites and articles to read, but I want to challenge their sharing, brokering and negotiating skills more. I have seen a lot of projects go awry because of no or lack of communication.  I have also noticed that when I give my students list of information, they are often not successful at synthesizing it or responding to it. I have never been one to implement discussion boards in my class because as a student myself, I do not enjoy them. I find them to be tedious and often do not put the effort I should into them. I understand that in an online class, this is the most common way to achieve communication, but I have tried to think of other ways to encourage this interaction. For group projects, I have the students create a living document on Google Drive. There they keep their notes and track the updates and changes they make to their final document. I tell them that if they are going to make a major change on the document, they need to include a comment as to why they thought this should happen. They also have to summarize the minor changes they made. I am not sure if Canvas allows videos to be uploaded in discussion boards, but I think this would also be a more attractive way to implement them into my class. This is what I plan to do with Snapchat in the fall. I would like students to respond to each other online, but as if they are having a face-to-face conversation with one another. I do want to include an activity that requires them to share information with one another, similar to how we shared an article of our own during week 4. Seeing the table of the six core activities and their associated actions really made it clear as to how I can achieve some of the learning objectives in my class and how some of the things I assumed were reaching these objectives were actually not.