CCK08: Click (finally), as it all makes sense

The clicking sound you hear is the CCK08 material aligning with some work I'm involved in at Berklee, where we're developing a new course for first semester students.  I've been working on versions of this course for 5 years now, from various approaches; now as part of a broad curriculum review and revision, it is moving along.  

As I was cutting and pasting a lovely quotation about how a First Semester Seminar could be taught from an older concept document into a shiny new course proposal (see below), I realized many of the ideas and themes overlapped with our CCK08 conversation, especially echoing the discussions about teaching we had in the past couple of weeks in Elluminate with Howard Rheingold and others.  It has to do with separating out the functions of the teacher as content expert on the one hand and facilitator on the other, so that process, thinking, and learning become central, not content delivery.

This is how Jerry Slezak, who blogs about his experiences teaching a Freshman Seminar at the University of Mary Washington, sees the unique purpose and method of FYE seminars:

Teaching a seminar-style course to first year students, where the emphasis in the course is on inquiry, rather than presentation or even exploration of a settled body of knowledge is quite different from either an upper-level seminar or a traditionally introductory course which enrolls first year students. The fundamental purpose of the FSEMs [freshman seminars] is not to teach content, but rather to introduce students to the life of the mind. At one level this has developed as an emphasis on teaching skills, but what we’re really [trying] to  articulate is something more holistic, not skills per se, but rather a model of the process of intellectual inquiry, the art or culture of the intellectual life.
Jerry Slezak, http://jerryslezak.net/pedablogy/?p=442

For our students, our approach to the “life of the mind” must include creativity and the development of the individual voice. 

I guess the insight I have to add after my "click" moment is that the technology is secondary, not primary.  In the very beginning of CCK08, the sheer volume of people arguing over the definition of connectivism in a flurry of posts and blogs was overwhelming, and it was hard to hear past it.  The technology can help make connections, or it can distract and divide us.   How we use it is what matters, and I'm glad I stuck with it until the din died down enough to really hear the ideas.  

When Howard Rheingold talked about having his social media students watch a video of him commenting/lecturing on Goffman instead of delivering that to them in class, that was really interesting.  In class, he is the facilitator, inviting them (actually, it seems, requiring them) to take on the responsibility to teaching the course.   I get a lot of resistance when I talk about making video resources like Howard is using, but I think there is a lot of value in separating the expert and facilitator functions of the teacher.  I think he is also using his video commentary as a reading, or a reading supplement, but that is a different topic (shift from text to video).  

All of this makes me realize that if we replace course content with the technological tools, we haven't gained enough, and it is an easy temptation to do that with all these fun, new toys. More importantly, we have to make sure our students know that we are not doing that.  I'm sure that Steven and George never intended for the technology to overtake the ideas, but it is how it felt to me for a while at the beginning.  Unless the learning and thinking, the life of the mind and the processes of creation, remain at the center and everything else we do is in its service, then its all a bunch of noise.  Click click. 

Virtual Facilitation

Last week, I attended (in real life) a two-day workshop on building essential facilitation skills for Berklee faculty, staff, and administrators.  It was an interesting experience to focus primarily on the process rather than on the content, and there were many valuable aspects to the workshop.  It was also a different experience to be holed up in the Sheraton Hotel right here in Boston for eight hours a day, almost as if it were a Second Life environment.  By the end I felt a little as if I were inhabiting a new avatar, Facilitation Grrl perhaps, but I also think that 2 days of indoor air, no gym, too little time with the twins, and too much coffee might have taken its toll as well.   An immersive experience indeed.  

It made me think about the issues raised by SL for facilitation, and as usual, I find that plenty of others have thought about this before me.  Beth 's Blog has a good post about online synchronous practices, and Rafi Santo over at RezEd, a good first stop for anything to do with education in SL, outlines as many kinds of situations that would require different kinds of facilitation as he can think of.  There is a New Zealand (I think) company offering specialized training in online facilitation: Zenergy and, not surprisingly, people offering the service of facilitation in SL for a fee.  

In teaching a class in SL, juggling both the text chat and video chat presents unique facilitation issues that have no parallel in brick-and-mortar education settings.  My teacher in the MassArt course Creativity in Second Life was very good at that; she would ask a question and while people were thinking or fiddling with screens or headphones or simply thinking of an answer, she would also type a short version of the question, sometimes only a word, that invited participation in both kinds of chat.  But so many of the excellent techniques we learned in the workshop were based on the kinds of body language, eye contact, facial expressions, and proximity that are absent in SL.  Until there is true video mapping of a person's face while they are talking, there won't be those non-verbal forms of information available in virtual communication.  

There are also so many distractions in SL even under the best of circumstances, forget about if there were people trying to avoid full participation who need to be brought into the group dynamic, that that would be very challenging.  It is one thing when everything is voluntary, but if education in SL were to become more widespread and part of requirements for an on-campus or online course, then other problems might arise.  

On another topic, I will be turning my attention full-time to my sabbatical project in just a few weeks.  I have been easing into the project over the summer, taking the Mass Art course, reading up on a few things, joining some listservs, working on a conference presentation for the Second Life Education Community Conference 2008 in early September, and also finishing up a book manuscript on media history and I Love Lucy, a topic I have been writing about off and on since I was a grad student.  It is interesting to think about what has changed in terms of the technological and representational challenges that the collaborators in the new medium of early television faced, in comparison to what we face as we create the new media of virtual worlds.