image: Chad Flinn via canva.com

I am going to be 100% honest When it comes to using technology and my educational practice I have no strategy.  I read about something or see it on YouTube, try it out and see if it sticks. I try to integrate as much as I can, but I am doing it with no real plan or structure.  As I read through the articles for unit three, I started learning how vital it was to be intentional about the designing of digital learning environments. (Veletsianos, 2016)

I was heartened (and a little overwhelmed) to learn that there is a multitude of resources and models to follow and learn.  It is difficult to condense all I learned in a short blog post, so I am going to share some of my takeaways.

The community of Inquiry model:  The idea of cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence is something that I will use as a framework as I design my future courses.  Whether this is the traditional model of CoI (community of inquiry) or the FOLC (fully online community) model (Blayone, Van Oostveen, Barber, & Childs, 2016) it is essential that I consider the three areas of cognition, social, and teaching as I design courses.

Groups:  Salmon’s five-stage model of developing learning communities intrigues me (Anderson & Dron, 2014) and is something that I would like to investigate further.  Access and motivation, online socialization, information exchange, knowledge construction, and development seem to be a robust framework on which to build an online learning community. As Anderson and Dron state in Teaching crowds:

“Salmons model has proved useful in many online learning communities and appears to describe what tends to happen in a well moderated learning community, offering good advice for those hoping to facilitate such a process.”(Anderson & Dron, 2014, pg. 107)

Networks: I always have thought of groups and networks as being almost synonymous.  As I learned, they are far from it. As Veletsianos states “While groups have boundaries, networks do not, and it is difficult to establish who is in and who is not in a network (Veletsianos, 2016, pg. 244).   We are all part of networks and networks can be a powerful resource in education.

I have been part of many online networks and see how useful they can be when you have a specific issue in a certain niche.  It will be interesting to explore how a more intentional network can be set up and curated in my field.

Sets and collectives:  Full disclosure, these are not areas that I am all that well-versed in.  As I read through “Teaching Crowds: learning and social media” I struggled with how I could use these tools in my practice.  Once I started to grasp the concepts, I realized how broad and vast these terms are. That is not to say they have no place, quite the contrary, my curiosity is piqued, and I want to investigate further how to integrate these concepts.  I especially find the idea of collectives exciting and look forward to reading and learning more about them.

It is hard to try to reflect on what kind of impact structures will have on my plan for the creation of my digital presence and identity in 200 words (At present this entry is now at 505 words).  One thing I do know to be true. If I want to make an impact on how I teach, I need to begin experimenting with what I’ve learned.

References

Anderson, T., & Dron, J. (2014). Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media. Athabasca University Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781927356807.01

Blayone, T. J. B., Van Oostveen, R., Barber, W., & Childs, E. (2016). Developing Learning Communities in Fully Online Spaces : Positioning the Fully Online Learning Community Model, (January 2017). Retrieved from https://moodle.royalroads.ca/moodle/pluginfile.php/376735/mod_book/chapter/124256/vanOostveen%2C DiGiuseppe%2C Childs %282016%29 Developing Learning Communities in Fully Online Spaces_Prepublication draft %283%29.pdf

Veletsianos, G. (2016). Digital Learning Environments. In The Wiley Handbook of Learning Technology (pp. 242–260). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118736494.ch14