Archive for the ‘Methode’ Category
Why open portfolios?
Posted on: April 30, 2018
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In the Content Strategy program my students create a portfolio, write approximately once a month a post and share it openly in the web. Provoked by discussions with my students, especially with the COS17 students, I want to make my intentions why reflect openly clearer. Read the rest of this entry »
I strongly believe that we learn by doing something: discussing, drawing, scribbling, modeling, reflecting and writing it down (or recording it). Therefore in my (training) classes people have to do something all the time. That’s also the basis of the online cos teachers’ training I developed a month ago and which is running at the moment. Content Strategy (COS) is a university program for students who work and study. A lot of the learning process is happening online and the teachers want to improve their asynchronous and synchronous teaching performance. Read the rest of this entry »
In the BizMOOC project we will create three pilot MOOCs. Last week the project team met in Cardiff at Open University (OU). After doing research and collecting a lot of data for the MOOC book – which went online at the end of February – we are now thinking about our MOOCs. During the partner meeting we had a one day workshop about learning design for MOOCs together with experts from OU – Martin Weller and Ruth McFarlane.
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Nearly a year has passed since my last post about MOOCs in February 2016.
I have not been lazy in this year and I haven’t stopped thinking about MOOCs. For example:
- In May 2016 together with Jenny Mackness I presented our work about Visualising structure and agency in a MOOC using the Footprints of Emergence framework at the tenth International Conference on Networked Learning in Lancaster.
- I was and still am involved in two European MOOC projects led by my university: the AtLETyc project and the BizMOOC project.
- In September, during the partner meeting of the AtLETyc project we decided spontaneously to create a small MOOC within a month to provide the partners with the MOOC experience on the one hand and to let them work on content for MOOCs on the other hand. If you are interested take a look at the AtLETyc MOOC camp.
- And I did some really great MOOC learning in Matt Silady’s Comics: Art in Relationship MOOC. Because drawing Comics takes a lot of time I have spent less time writing about MOOCs ….
In the future my dealing with MOOCs will get more intensive as we will build one MOOC for athletes with useful knowledge for them with respect to the time after their sports career and another MOOC to provide business key competences to whoever may relate to.
In the BizMOOC project a common body of knowledge was collected which resulted in 14 discussion papers about MOOCS and online education, MOOCs initiatives, MOOC types, MOOC quality and MOOC pedagogy, drivers behind MOOCs, recognition of learning in MOOCs, business models for MOOCs, MOOCs and human resources, and useful online material for the BizMOOC.
Furthermore in the BizMOOC project we investigated needs and gaps with respect to business people, people in Higher Education and the society as a whole. I find the society survey on MOOCs very interesting. And I’m a little bit sad that according to this report face-to-face rather than online courses are still preferred by participants. There are so many amazing online courses out there in the web!
At the upcoming partner meeting in Cardiff this week we will work on the concepts for the three Pilot MOOCs focusing on life-long learning, business key competences and innovation & creativity. We will create a cMOOC, an xMOOC and a Hybrid-MOOC. I’m looking forward to our training session with Martin Weller, whom I got to now at the #change11 MOOC.
Challenge: create comics!
Posted on: September 29, 2016
As mentioned before in my contribution How to use comics to organize and reflect (online) learning processes I’m engaged in creating comics. My objective is to evaluate how to use comics in my teaching. You may ask:
Why should a teacher use comics in his or her teaching?
As I believe that learning takes place inside the head of a person and I cannot influence that a lot (constructivism) I’m looking for tools to nourish the curiosity of my students. My approaches are broad and diverse while I facilitate mostly online learning processes (connectivism, emergent learning).
Phase 1: In May of this year I started with Nick Sousanis Grids and gestures exercise which turned out to be a nice experience. I learned how to create abstract comics and use them for structuring and reflection. I even offered a comics workshop for my colleagues who liked it a lot. Stimulated by the comic making exercise I reflected the positioning of grids in a comic and considered the relationship between space and image.
Phase 2: At the moment I’m learning in Matt Silady’s Comics: Art in Relationship MOOC. This time it’s a lot harder because I have to draw “real” comics. We are now in week 4 and I haven’t started yet with the homework of week 3! Until now I created a two pages comic about myself and 5 (!) comic diaries.
It’s amazing for me to discover that there is a lot of theory behind comics! And I love theory when I’m invited to apply it.
In the first week Matt defines comics as visual art in relationship and broadens the former definition of sequential art. He invits us to look for comics in our every day life.
In the second week he mentions three types of relationships in comics: visual art & visual art (image & image), visual art & text, visual art & cultural context (mainly used in comic jokes). He lists 7 image-image relationships (moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect, non-sequitur, symbolic) and 7 text-image relationships (word specific, picture specific, duo specific, intersecting, interdependent, parallel, montage/pictorial).
In the third week we think about time and space, which are one in comics, as Matt declares. The “gutter” between one comic grid and the next can contain a different amount of time, one second, one hour, one day, a whole life, … And that’s the next assignment I’m thinking about at the moment!
Reflection: Drawing this comics I realize that I cannot draw … so I limit myself to stick figures and strange perspectives. On the positive side I can imagine stories and I get ideas how to sketch them. During this time I moved from black&white images to colored ones.
In the back of my head I’m looking for ideas how to transfer comics into my teaching. And …. I already used some of my own comics in a presentation at a conference.
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Today I’m organizing a workshop about the use of comics as Nick Sousanis describes it. I like his approach to combine pictures and words and I’m curios how my colleagues, mostly university teachers will evaluate this approach.
Part I: Nick Sousanis Approach
At the beginning I will ask people about their “relationship” with comics (I never liked comics a lot). Then I will present some of Nick Sousanis ideas very shortly. In groups the participants will discuss the comic page Balanced between art and laguage to deal with Nick’s drawings.
Part II: Grids and gestures
The most important part of the workshop will be the part where the participants draw the shape of their days and discuss their experience. They should reflect how thinking about the day and structuring it in grids on the one hand and the drawing itself changes their perception of this day. We will discuss splashes cutting through the grid and the role of emptiness.
Part III: Transfer
At the end I will present the transfer of these ideas in my work: once I was overwhelmed with structuring a complex workshop – and drawing a comic helped! And I gave my students a voluntary comic exercise. Then the participants will work on ideas in their own context.
Links
- Sousanis, Nick (2015). Unflattening. Harvard University Press
- Nick Sousanis (2015). Comic making exercise. SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 8.
- Nick Sousani (2015): Between Words and Pictures Emerges the Shape of Ideas. Digital Writing Month
- Unflattening: text, drawing and alternative perspectives (blogpost of Jenny Mackness)
- Meine Comics Gallery – April – Juli 2016
- Tweets mit dem Hashtag #gridsgestures
- Folien: Comics als Ordnungs-/Reflexionswerkzeug in (Online-) Lernprozessen (Deutsch)
At the moment I’m sitting in this wonderful garden enjoying a splendid day in the Lake District. I’m told that normally it’s raining here all the time so I’m very lucky to experience already the third day of sun in the companionship of Jenny Mackness.
Of course we didn’t only walk and cycle and eat and chat – but were engaged in a profound discussion of our presentation about the footprints of emergence at the Networked Learning Conference in Lancaster – improving and finalizing it as well. Jenny believes that we could have invested more time and could have been more focused on the topic of our presentation but I’m confident about the power of emergent learning and our wandering around in the real landscape and in our inner landscapes.
Chatting with Jenny means to share experiences, to discuss believes, to get new ideas for collaboration, to get new books to read … and as we mostly meet online these face-to-face days are very valuable.
Jenny likes to learn in MOOCs and it seems that if she starts a MOOC she will finish it as well – which is not true for all the MOOCs I learned in. As I was in love with the Change11 MOOC (and did finish it!) my ideal MOOC would be an open and challenging cMOOC as well. But when I convinced people of my university that we should develop and offer a MOOC to get experiences about its potential and opportunities I had to acknowledge that nor our students nor my teacher colleagues would profit from a pure cMOOC.
Therefore we went for a hybrid design in the case of our Competences for Global Collaboration MOOC (cope15) with a weekly structure, learning materials including videos by experts and 2-3 tasks by week. Nevertheless I fought for a design as open as possible which challenges the learners by offering a lot of learning opportunities, encouraging them to look for further information about the topics and sharing them with other learners. And I gave them the opportunity to draw a footprint of emergence in the last week of our MOOC to reflect their learning process.
In preparing our paper Jenny and I investigated the footprints of the learners and the design footprint of the MOOC. We perceived a certain success of the design intentions and we liked the attitude of the learners engaged with the footprints. Of course further work analyzing footprints of emergence and relating them to learning scenarios and to individual learners has to be done.
Ein gruppendynamischer Fußabdruck
Posted on: April 8, 2016
Seit Jahren verwende ich die Footprints of emergence zur Reflexion meiner Lernerfahrungen. Die letzten sechs Tage verbrachte ich auf einem gruppendynamischen Seminar und ich erlebte eine recht heftige Lernerfahrung. Das gruppendynamische Setting – sich 40 Einheiten im Sesselkreis gegenübersitzen, in Austausch kommen, Beobachtungen und Gefühle teilen – hat mich stark gefordert. (siehe auch Peter Brügge: Ich lasse mich nicht auseinandernehmen, 1970).
Ich glaube, seit meiner Teilnahme am Change11-MOOC war das meine heftigste Lernerfahrung. In allen vier Clustern gibt es Faktoren, denen ich Werte im Chaos (ganz außen) zugeordnet habe.
Cluster Offenheit/Struktur: Ich empfand die Weiterbildung als gefährlich (Risk), galt es doch, sich ehrlich und ungeschminkt mit anderen und mir selbst auseinanderzusetzen. Den entstandenen Lernraum empfand ich als grenzenlos (Lim), was anstrengend war! Die Faktoren Störung, Selbstkorrektur, Viele Lernwege (Dis, S/C, Mp) liegen hingegen im Bereich der sweet emergence, da das Setting recht starr vorgegeben war.
Cluster Interaktive Lernumgebung: Die Diversität der Menschen in der Gruppe, die Diversität ihrer Geschichten und Bedürfnisse (Div) war immer wieder einmal zuviel für mich. So stark mit anderen – im Netzwerk -zusammenzuarbeiten (FIN) war eine Grenzerfahrung für mich, ging es doch darum Vertrauen in die Gruppe (Trust) aufzubauen, auch zu mir selbst, und Persönlichkeiten – “Minds” – zu begegnen, die anders sind, anders lernen (ToM).
Cluster Persönliche Entwicklung: Meine Bewertung der Faktoren hier ist sehr unterschiedlich. Einige Faktoren finden sich nahe der vorgeschriebenen Zone. Ich empfand, dass ich viele Möglichkeiten der Einflussnahme (OAff) hatte, obwohl ich wenig frei im Bereich der Selbstorganisation (SOrg), Autonomie (A), Verhandelbarkeit von Ergebnissen (NegO) war. Als sehr anstrengend und manchmal zuviel war für mich die Auseinandersetzung mit meiner Identität (ID).
Cluster Eigener Stil / Selbstpräsenz: Auch in diesem Cluster forderte mich das Netzwerk (Net). Kein reales Netzwerk, da ich meine Kontakte zur Außenwelt in diesen sechs Tagen minimierte, sondern mein inneres Netzwerk, wenn ich mittags bei wunderschönem Wetter meist alleine spazieren ging und im inneren Dialog mit den anderen TeilnehmerInnen oder sonstigen mir wichtigen Menschen war.
An diesem Footprint ist für mich meine stark unterschiedliche Bewertung der Faktoren im Cluster der Persönlichen Entwicklung neu. Ich “lernte wenig” in Bezug auf Lernautonomie und war trotzdem in diesem Cluster sehr stark gefordert.
Diesen Footprint verwende ich auch in der ersten Woche meines Online-Kurses Fußabdrücke von Lernprozessen, der gestern begonnen hat.
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After my sabbatical of six months and the possibility to enhance the ‘life’ factor of my work-life balance by traveling, improving a foreign language, enjoying very impressive wonders of nature I’m back at work.
And : the most import topic in these first weeks of work are MOOCs.
- In this week the university of Graz offered the eMOOCs 2016 conference.
- I’m moderating an online course for university teachers and support them to get first ideas of the plentitude of MOOCs.
- My colleagues of the Institute of International Management started with a big new project, the BizMOOC (Knowledge Alliance), and I’m invited to collaborate in the production and implementation of several MOOCs.
- A paper reflecting emergent learning processes in our cope15 MOOC with the Footprints of Emergence which I wrote during the sabbatical together with Jenny Mackness was accepted for the networked learning conference in Lancaster
- And: I’m attending the #NRC01PL MOOC of Stephen Downes
In the first week of the NRC01PL MOOC I dealt with opposite terms:
- design versus environment – slides 16 – 20 of Downes presentation ‘beyond instructional design‘
- instruction versus learning – Aras Bozkurt very useful blogpost
- personalized versus personal – in the openedx platform there was an intense discussion about these two aspects in a learning environment
I recognized how much I prefer the environment metaphor, learning instead of instruction and personal decisions instead of a personalized framework. At the moment I enjoy the freedom in this MOOC and that ideas and thoughts can emerge without constraints. I love it to scan the #NRC01PL tweets and to react.
And I believe that it is easier to learn in this MOOC if you are ‘elderly‘, with high IT skills and good understanding of English (Personal Learning MOOC Survey 1). I realize that my students with a different background (and age) (but better English) have many good reasons to struggle with open learning scenarios based on connectivism and emergent learning.
Bahia Lapataia – Tierra del fuego
Reflecting the cope15 MOOC
Posted on: June 26, 2015
About three weeks ago our cope15 MOOC was finished successfully.
First let’s speak about numbers:
- 460 learners from 32 countries were registered in our MOOC, 302 (66%) were at least once active.
- Mostly they were students from our university but some of them came from other universities as well and a small group were lifelong learners.
- All together there were 48,738 views at the cope15 website, in April on average 1304 views a day, in May 699.
- The learners wrote more than 4100 comments at the cope15 website mostly as answer to the assignments. There was no interaction in the Google+ community and few activities in the Facebook group.
- 126 learners (27,4% of the registered learners, 42% of the learners who were at least one time active) got a badge – 102 business students, but as well students from social work, information design, communication design and construction. 6 lifelong learners got a badge.
The topics of the week were about online learning, global collaboration, business and communication. This was the distribution of interaction during the cope15 weeks:
- week 1 Intercultural Collaboration: Introduction and Warm-up 271 Participants (58,91%)
- week 2 Legal cultures 184 Participants (40,00%)
- week 3 International Communication and Negotiation 106 Participants (23,04%)
- week 4 Doing Business in Emerging Markets 93 Participants (20,22%)
- week 5 Inter-organizational Relationships & Networks 130 Participants (28,26%)
- week 6 Transfer into Individual Contexts 118 Participants (25,65%)
As usual in MOOCs there were many activities during the first two weeks. In the following 4 weeks about 25% of the registered learners were active. 37 (8%) contributed to all weeks, and 49/50 (10%) to four respectively five weeks.
There were some differences to last year’s cope14 MOOC. This year nearly all the activities were conducted on the website via comments. The business students were the drivers of the common learning process and the exchange. Last year in cope14 there were more learners without sound knowledge of business topics. Therefore they posted their questions to be discussed in the weekly videoconference. This year there were only a few or no questions at all which made the exchange with the experts of the week not that exciting.
The update of the content worked well. Whereas last year there was too much content in one week this year all weeks worked really well. In the reflection of week six the learners stated that they were satisfied with the MOOC and that they learned a lot.
We used the footprints of emergence again to evaluate the learning process. 49 learners created their footprint, especially interesting is the work of Alex who was a learner in the cope14 and the cope15 MOOC. I plan to write a post about footprints soon.
Footprints of Alex, left: reflection of cope14, right: reflection of cope15
In cope14 and cope15 there were two moderators who monitored all activities and supported the learners and experts. On large A3 sheets I tried to document all the comments and interaction. In this way I had the feeling to get to know a rather large number of learners. I believe that bonding facilitates learning and I like to care for my online groups.
Jupidus collections 
