Re:Reading, Week 2

I was reading Reading, Week 2 on Pan Narrans and i was thinking that he brought out the very key points.

What needs to be clarified in your team is will you favour cooperative or collaborative workstyle.

Another thing what seems to be not clear from your post is proximal zone of development and using it.

You write: The way I personally understand collaborative learning is that the group should pretty much be on the same zone of proximal development.

I think proximal zone of development is helpful if people are at different levels in group at different things. Then they can giva a hand and help the peers.

Starting groupwork

This week we can test out how well our group space really works.

Initially, our group space is organized two ways:

a) If you activated your Read plugin at Adimn area and requested the weblogs of all the group members, the mashed feed appears and you can easily keep track of all the postings and reply to the postings in YOUR weblog.

b) Another option is less organised and more time-consuming, if you activated the widgets from your weblog you could add the group-members weblog feeds you can monitor them. But for posting comments you need to go to each weblog separately and this takes time. Aso it is not easy to see the whole group to work together.

These solutions are not the only ones. You as a group are encouraged to use also other tools for organizing groupwork. But you need to propose which tools and you must all come up to the common ground where the regulative activities will happen.

In a way, your decision may be related with the next big task at the course - preparing the prototype of an e-learning course of your own. For example, if that course will be FLE3 based, you can also use FLE3 for discussions. If the course is based on shared weblog it may also serve as the joint space. You may also give permissions of your group mates to write posts in your weblog. You may start using different wikis or collaborative writing tools etc. A selection of tools you can find from here.

Practical activities for this week:
1. Find at least one good and one bad example case of course design and reflect your opinions of these courses in personal blog.

Visit the blogs of your group mates, read their reflections of course designs and add your opinions as comments about these courses.
2. As a group define what are the criteria for a good online course and reflect it in your group space (whatever you choose this to be), but make this group space visible to other groups by posting a link to your personal weblogs.

PS! Do not forget to write your weekly reflection post as well: