Tonight our class session was with Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman. I arrived late, so I’m just following up on one point until I have a chance to listen to what I missed.
On my drive today, I was thinking about the difference between a discussion in an LMS (aka Bb or D2L) and the dialogue created from a blog posting. Last term my courses were about “here is the discussion topic, or topics, create one original post and at least 2 responses to others”. On the surface, it seems appropriate to establish an expectation and an associated rubric for a course activity. The activity is designed to promote learning, n’est-ce pas? But often I found myself (a) wanting to discuss something either quite tangential or not apparently linked or (b) not stimulated by others’ postings sufficiently to want to respond.
Fast forward to this current class, where we are each expected to maintain a blog of reflective discourse about our personal learning journey. Now I get to write about what is important and interesting to me, and further I get to respond as I choose to the writings of others. If a posting causes me to think differently about an issue, or I wish to challenge what is written, I can respond directly or I can create a post myself. I can respond to comments in my own blog, and we can link one to the other. These original posts and comments are dialogue – you can visibly observe learning happening. Discussion threads felt more, as D’Arcy described them, like chaotic disjointed conversations.
My personal preference is clearly a blog or blog-like environment, and I had posed the question more as an instructor than a student. Does one modality create a better quality learning outcome than the other? Or is it the expectations of the instructor within the environment that makes the difference?
March 19, 2008 at 5:53 am
[...] morning Roadrunner posed these questions in her blog. “Does one modality create a better quality learning [...]
March 20, 2008 at 8:27 am
I completely agree with your preference. I have truly enjoyed the ‘freedom’ a blog allows compared to a more ‘presribed’ posting that is often required (depending on the class). I enjoy reading about different topics and thoughts. When 20 people need to comment on the same thing, the answers eventually end up being the same . . . just re-worded. I found myself(in my last class which also had ‘prescribed’ postings) rushing to be the first one to post, so my ideas seemed original. In the case where I was one of the last to post, I had nothing new to offer on the subject!!
I think the learning (for me) has been much better blogging. I have learned more reading blogs (from this course) than I did from posting threads in my last class. I do not feel as if I am not ‘meeting the course requirements’ if I don’t post something all the time. I am contributing to the class my simply responding to a post, being allowed to comment freely. This also shows that the way the class is set up by the instructor has an impact on learning as well.