The blog post said it had timed out when I was updating it after adding three or four paragraphs. That’s is very bad. I find its really difficult to get the motivation to repeat a lot of comments after they have been made once.
It is Thursday of week 2 and I have just carved out some time to look at Week Two course materials I am engaged on an international collaborative project to produce open source educational resources for collaboration in OpenSimulator and Second Life. I am acting as a coordinator, editor and tester and this week a lot of the materials have started to come together.
2.2: Into the Unknown: On the “Unknowns” Padlet activity I noted the “unknown” as I see it of having little sense of who else is engaged with the study group or class. Maybe I need to dip again into the Discussion Forums.
Discssion Forums: Just dipped back into the discussion forums. It nice and clearly marks replies or comments you have had on previous posts. So you can go an read or comment back on the inputs. But I don’t at the moment see a simple way to get back to my own previous inputs or comments. I am sure that functionality must be there somewhere.
Claudia commented that Second LifeSecond LifeSecond Life was not up to much.. so I pointed her at a blog post written for a Head of School in the University who wanted to know how we used virtual world in the University…
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2018/04/27/virtual-worlds-technology-for-university-of-edinburgh/
2.3 and 2.4: Disengagement Cases: Having to retype and remember what I said since my previous updates were lost when post editing “timed out” and no history of the changes were in the revisions list. I thought WordPress occasionally saved in progress versions there. Maybe not.
Essentially my thoughts were that student self help and off course communication channels were good, but some way to ask for friendly students to bridge the gap and raise issues they see in a way that does not name individuals would be good. Drop in sessions timed so that they work for those with home and social responsibilities, or perhaps travelling (in the past!) would be helpful.
2.7: Mitigating Transactional Distance: s you know I am keen on persistent shared social and interaction spaces. So for the “Padlet” activity I suggested a “virtual coffee room” (our American colleagues might call it the “Water Cooler” area) – Have a shared persistent space where folks can feet, chat, post notes and provide some sense of community and continuity. Links from this out to the online resources by giving them a “physical” point of reference.
Our research work on I-Rooms; virtual spaces for intelligent interaction” relate to this… see https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2011/09/15/i-room-a-virtual-space-for-intelligent-interaction/
2.8: Teacher Presence: is important. The comments on blog posts is a great way to have the student feel they are involved and that the teacher is interested and present.
2.9: I actually did not get to this until the beginning of week three comments on teacher presence in 2.9 were interesting, as I found that we spent a lot of time interacting with students and the weekly guest feature lecturers on the Coursera AI Planning MOOC we ran.