Pan Narrans

I like the idea of being able to access my bookmarks anytime, anywhere and with any computer. Unfortunately my bookmarks tend to be scattered around different computers (home, work and so on..) so I end up exporting them and storing the exported file somewhere without actually never getting around and compiling one master bookmarks -file for my convenience. Not to mention when I’m visiting a friend and find something useful and end up emailing the link to myself.

So I have tried del.icio.us and just now Diigo, but they both lack a very fundamental and basic functionality. They are probably nice tools as such, but both of them require a plugin to work properly. You can not actually even add a bookmark without having an extension/plugin in your browser. So what about when I’m using a computer which I don’t have proper access rights to install new extensions, say at the university? Can I add this fine and excellent bookmark I just found for future refence? No, I can not.

I understand that both of these services are much more than very basic, run of the mill, bookmarking services. But still, if I need a special widget in my browser just to add an online bookmark, then they fail to meet the very basic needs. Why I can not just log in to the site and add a bookmark that way, is it too much to ask for?

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

It was boring how there was no discussion about different work spaces. Could have as well flipped a coin when choosing one.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
   about it?

How can I create a learning contract when it is supposed to be based on my role/task in our group? I know, I know.. it can always be added later on. Meh.

As Mikko wrote in his own reflection for this week, the whole “dividing work by roles” concept is somewhat unclear for me as well.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

Well, first of all; Google groups isn’t an actual collaborative work space, but more of a “news group” with some extra features. Wiki would be a better environment for this kind of work.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Created work space in Google Groups with Mikko and started to work on documents, NetNewsWire to follow the necessary RSS feeds, Skype (added Kai and Damir to contacts), ICQ (added Damir to contacts).

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

Invited all group members to Google groups. Replied to Cosmin in the work space discussion area. Commented Damir’s blog.

To my dismay there are some unfortunate snags in Google Groups when it comes to collaborative work. I’m not sure whether these are “features”, or if there is some unknown logic behind the reason why they have been implemented that way. I realize that I have a tendency to bash different technologies and software solutions, but in my defense: this is (mainly O:)) because I want to get to the bottom of things.

So what it is that bothers me in Google Groups? - The page edit timestamps and who is the last editor are missing from the front page.

We can see who has created the page and when, but we do not see when it has been edited last time and by whom. Now, this information is available in the page itself, and the last edited information is available when “Pages” is selected from the menu. BUT, there is no information in the Pages subpage who is the last editor. Ok, it is not that big of a deal right now as we only have a couple of pages.

Combine that with the fact that we cannot set the local time user-specific. So at some point of time we will end up with ten pages and edit times are expressed in 12-hour clock only, the local time being set to who knows what. As a result the only way to make sure that there are no new edits, we have to check every single page manually to be sure of this. So we already have nine or so blogs to follow and now we have ten more pages that we need to check every time we want to get up to date. Sounds like a big fat waste of time to me.

Another thing is that there is no way to set the actual language preference in which you will always see the pages. I tried to access our group with Internet Explorer and got everything in Finnish. The most ridiculous thing was that when I edited a page it tried to send an email to the whole group informing them about the edit in Finnish. I kid you not.

Let’s list some positive features so this post won’t be all negative. :D

PROS:

• Page-specific access control
• Can be made “members only” completely
• Email notification of new messages (Is this discussion threads only?)
• 100mb of space for files
• RSS feed for Discussion topics and messages (no feed for page edits though :/)
• Don’t be evil.

There might be something else, but I’m off to watch Into the Wild and enjoy some banged grain. Please leave a comment if you disagree or have more information.

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

That the FeedBack-plugin does not work properly (the RSS feed it creates is not chronologically ordered). Following actively over 8 blogs is a great strain on resources. The best way to follow blogs and their comments is through RSS feeds. This way you’ll always see when a new comment appears, even on an old posting. Good aggregator is essential, but most of the (free) solutions available do not deliver an user friendly experience.

I would suggest that everybody places the “Recent comments” widget on their blog’s front page. This allows visitors to see immediately what posts have been commented.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

I found it interesting that with the help of RSS (or XML) feeds, it is possible to keep up to date easily with a wide range of websites and services.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
   about it?

There always is.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

How are we going to make up for the two weeks we are behind the schedule as a group? I’m running on a tight schedule and on top of that I’m getting fed up with this course.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Realized that I needed a better way of keeping track with all the different RSS feeds and found a nice little tool for it: NetNewsWire (Os X only, sorry). The same company has solutions for Windows and online reading as well. Unfortunately the latter two are not that good. The FeedDemon works, but it lacks that certain finesse the NetNewsWire possesses (that is a screenful and a half! :D).

Went through a plethora of RSS readers and aggregators in my quest for finding a working solution. Here’s some of them: Google Reader, NewsGator Online, Feed-on-Feeds, Sage (Firefox add-on), Wizz RSS (Firefox add-on) and Thunderbird (to see how it handles RSS feeds).

Tinkered with Wikispaces some more to see how to get “the best bang for the buck”.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

Commented Mikko’s and Damir’s blogs, spoke with Mikko (IRL and IRC).

Last evening I realized that I did not actually say anything at all about Wikispaces when I did a light comparison of workspaces in my previous posting. What I do not like in Wikispaces is how the discussion is always tied to a certain page, now this is not as big of a problem as I thought because it can be overcome easily, I’ll explain how later. Another pet peeve of mine is how the text formatting is not user friendly in the discussion areas. This is great drawback, because inserting links or bolding the text can be really awkward and time consuming. There are instructions on how to do this kind of formatting, and I can personally live with it. (I’m not happy about it though.)

Now, the problem with the page specific discussion areas. We can always just agree that the first page is where all the general discussion is going to take place and that the page specific discussion should take place in that page’s discussion area. This could lead to a problem, because it would be hard to always follow every single page to see whether there’s something new in the discussion area. This is where I found a nice surprise; They actually have page and discussion area specific RSS feeds as well as the whole space-wide RSS feeds. So if I make an contribution to a certain discussion, it will show up in the space-wide RSS feed like this: <PAGE NAME: Topic of the discussion>. With the help of these RSS feeds we can keep up with the changes and discussions that take place in our Wikispaces wikispace (hah :D).

Because of this I’ve decided to favor Wikispaces over Google groups. Another reason is that it would definitely be much more productive to use a wiki for this kind of work. Zoho and pbwiki still suck when compared to these two options.

I read from Anu’s blog her description of a bad course and that got me thinking.. I have taken the Basics of Databases course that she refers to and I completely disagree with her. I know it is an intensive course that has a lot of content and can come as a bit of a surprise considering how easy most of the courses are in our department, but this doesn’t make it a bad course. On the contrary, it’s one of the best designed courses our department has to offer.

Good design

Learning to draw (E)ER-diagrams is not an easy task. The way entities and their relations need to be analyzed to create a meaningful database model is something that cannot be taught easily. Anyone can draw a simple diagram, but when complex relations have to be analyzed in order to understand what they actually would mean in a database.. well, that is hard.

The lecturer draws diagrams all the time, that’s true.. but he simultaneously actually explains what he is doing and poses questions to the students. There are numerous logical blunders that people can make when they do not know how they should analyze entities and their relations. The lecturer shows us the way we need to think when drawing these diagrams by challenging us to think about the diagrams he is drawing and by demonstrating what the relations actually mean when the a database is created by using that model. This is something one cannot learn from a book, it has to come from experience and that requires work. So the lecturer activates the audience by posing questions and then demonstrates what the consequences would be based on to their answers.

Then there are the labs. Paper labs, where students need to draw ER-diagrams beforehand and then these diagrams are analyzed to see what went wrong. And from time to time a student will ask a question that the lecturer has never thought of because of the complexity of this modeling method. There are SQL-queries on paper to databases and again we are demonstrated what the results would be. All these tasks that need to be solved before a lab and during the lab the mistakes students have made are explained to everybody. So we do not learn only from our own errors, but also from the errors others have made giving us multiple perspectives to a single problem.

During the computer labs on the other hand we are taught how to actually use the SQL in real-life. We need to activate the theory in order to understand how everything actually works.

The compulsory programming assignment on the other hand is a real-life problem that we need to solve. So we have to apply the information we have learned by integrating the theory to practice.

Bad design

Well, Mikko described the course already quite thoroughly. To recap it; 6 ETCS course, vital and compulsory for every student in our department, extremely complex subject. Design: read a few books, see you in exam, no feedback provided.

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

That personal motivation suffers from inactivity within a group. From The Use of Traditional Instructional Design Models for eLearning article, “Motivation is internal to the learner, not something that can be provided by a facilitator or a learning program.”

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring: How our group seems to be getting nowhere. Interesting: The articles gave again food for thought about course design.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
   about it?

So many questions.. so little time. This whole ISD -issue would need a whole lot more time to understand how to apply these design patterns (or models?) in real life. I like the idea of applying rapid prototyping in course design, but the idea of being able to design a whole course from a scratch seems so distant and vague.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

How to evaluate a course? What kind of scale can be used to determine whether a course is good or bad. Especially when the course is a part of a curriculum how can it be evaluated as a part of the big picture?

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Tried out pbwiki and Zoho just to see how they work and what features they have. Tried out doodle on Kai’s suggestion. My intention was to make a poll, but Mikko beat me to it. :) Played around with Google groups and Wikispaces to make sure that I remembered their features correctly.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

Commented Mikko’s, Kai’s and Damir’s blogs. The usual IRC-chat with Mikko as well face-to-face with Mikko and Veera.

I just realized that I’ll always have to say that I communicated with Mikko because we always speak about school stuff. Even when we “relax” we talk about school and this is something our friends commonly complain about. :D

Explain, what are the components of course design

There’s loads and loads of stuff that make up the components of course design. This is but a feeble attempt to describe some of them.

Structure

What needs to be taught, in what extent and in what order. The content should be arranged so that learners will understand the relation of different pieces of information within the course.

Content

During a normal lecture students can ask questions immediately if they do not understand something. As this immediate feedback is not possible in elearning, the content should be designed so that it is clear and unambiguous from the learners perspective.

Motivation and feedback

How to motivate the students to actively participate to the course. What kind of feedback will be provided and when the students can expect feedback.

Interaction

What sort of interaction will be designed if any. How to involve the learners with the material and this way encourage cognition.

Involvement

How to involve learners with the instructional process and have them perform activities. I think that both interaction and involvement are implemented when a learner is presented with a real-life, or authentic, activities are presented.

I’m starting to get a bit worried here because of the lack of communication. What should we do to get things rolling?

Anyway, Kai has kindly suggested a few solutions which we could use; Zoho and pbwiki. Mikko has expressed his interest towards Zoho, but I’m not convinced about it. I tried both Zoho wiki and pbwiki this evening and they both lack that little something. Zoho is a step towards the right direction, but pbwiki is straight out of the window. If there’s a way in Zoho to implement a forum, or at least a better way for having discussions, then it might work. As Kai and Mikko have said, there are several little tools in Zoho and I have tried only the wiki. Then there’s Wikispaces, which also has it’s own shortcomings.

What I’d like to see is a forum that can be subscribed as a RSS feed. You can subscribe comments in Zoho wiki, but threads are not supported by the comment system. My reasoning for a forum with a RSS feed is that this way we can easily see the feed with a reader (or add the feed to our blog or whatever) and be up to date immediately without the need to logging in to one more system.

Now, Google groups has this feature, plus we can share documents and construct different pages under our group. There are several other nice features as well and access control is one of them. Our group can be open for everybody, or we can make it a closed group if we wish to do so. This is why my vote goes for Google groups.

I think we should make a poll on what instant messaging software people are using the most. This is my personal list ordered by my activity:

1. IRC (running in a screen so I’m always there)
2. Messenger
3. ICQ
4. Skype (I rarely open it nowadays)

Well, it’s past midnight so I’m off to a bar. Cheerio! :)

Kai Pata wrote:

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.

I have to disagree with this. The way I see it is that in collaborative learning the group as a whole will benefit more when people are indeed on the same zone of proximal development. On an individual level the master-apprentice setting is probably much more productive, especially from the apprentices point of view. But in group work the more experienced members on the whole will end up being the tutors and their own learning is hampered by the way this role is thrust upon them. The group can advance much more when they don’t have to negotiate every single detail in, well, detail.

I understand that the traditional socio-cognitive perspective prefers the original Vygotskian view where people should be on different levels. There are situations where this is the best approach, but is it definitely so in collaborative learning?