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Anna C Page

H817 Weeks 18-19 Activity 19 Reflecting on your project

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Edited by Anna Carolyn Page, Wednesday, 23 Jun 2021, 17:25

At the start of this project we didn’t know each other, having only met via the module forums in Blocks 1 and 2. We had to gauge each other’s vision and strengths from our early discussions via the forum and our WhatsApp group before our first meeting online meeting on 13 May. As a group of 4, smaller than the other groups, we were also faced with proportionally more work per person than others. We were all at different stages in the module at that point, with some not officially ready to start block 3, an added complication. Therefore, we began with more of a mountain to climb than was ideal, however with great determination and hope to progress as far as possible with the project and get to know each other a bit in the process. I’m proud we have succeeded in getting through all the tasks and have produced a project website (https://sites.google.com/view/h817-blue-group/home) which we think presents our ideas and evidence well. I am also pleased with how well we have worked together in a spirit of respectful encouragement towards each other, there have been no major disagreements about approach which could have caused a lot of difficulty, as we have each approached the project with willingness to build academic dialogue and consensus regarding practice around each topic of discussion.

Looking back, I realise our collective willingness to be flexible about tasks and encouraging towards each other (even if only able to offer moral rather than practical support towards TMA02 submission) was a key to our success in getting as far as we did. Indeed, in some respects we were practising something of what Ken noted was needed in successful use of digital storytelling in professional learning situations: a “level of emotional support for the learner” (Wagner, 2021). The informality of our WhatsApp group helped us get some idea of each other’s interests and attitudes, this helped us gradually build our own mini ‘community of practice’ (Wenger, 1998) of collective support as we constructed our project together. Meeting each other regularly online (8 meetings from 13 May to 18 June, with one more scheduled to finish off our heuristic evaluation) has also helped us connect visually as we mostly kept cameras on during our meetings. A strangely fortunate by-product of pandemic induced remote working meant we were already familiar with the mechanics and practicalities of working with others at a distance (although the others in our team are all working face-to-face with colleagues as well as doing some remote working) so the group project with other students spread all around the country (we are all UK based so had no time-zone problems) was not quite so daunting as it might have been.

One of the things I learned was the need for patience with asynchronous working when others are at different stages in a task, as I wanted us to keep going while giving enough attention to each task, striking a balance often meant we were working on 2 or 3 tasks concurrently. We all had a collective responsibility to take note of what we had to do next, though the team leader and project manager roles were geared towards guiding such activity. While the project manager was busy finishing off her TMA02, to a certain extent I, as team leader, assumed some of the project manager role (updating the progress tracker), while she made excellent notes during our synchronous meetings. Keeping people motivated wasn’t as hard as it could have been if we had allowed the sheer volume of tasks to overwhelm us, and fortunately everyone was keen to make a good contribution especially when utilising their strengths, which fortunately were complimentary. During persona creation it was particularly helpful that two of our group (Potenza and Paul) work in the healthcare sector which enabled us to add realism to the characters we designed. The research manager’s efforts to expand on evidence in addition to what each of us shared resulted in an impressive depth and breadth of research to inform our approach. The media manager’s technical skills helped us configure our website settings and build the prototype interactivity more swiftly and effectively than if all of us had spent the time getting to grips with the prototyping software in a short space of time. I did plenty of consistency, structural, navigational and accessibility changes to our website. I also summarised our vision and findings into the ‘Our definition and use of Digital Storytelling’ and ‘Design Challenge’ pages, and identified the need for ethical practices to underpin the use of Digital Storytelling in healthcare CPD in a case study ‘First do no harm: developing an ethical process of consent and release for digital storytelling in healthcare’ (Page, 2021).

The process of practicing learning design in a small project team using the 19 steps of the Learning Design Studio approach has illuminated the importance of allowing time to fully explore each step. Doing learning design thoroughly resulted in a more convincing prototype than skimping some steps would have done. Paul’s Design Pattern ‘Is it the digital storytelling or the process that counts?’ (Hindle, 2021) illuminates this point, there is huge value and much to be learned from participating in the process, regardless of the quality of the resulting product.

We have a good spread of strengths and experience in our small team and I’m glad we picked the focus of our project that we did, inspired by a real project paused by the pandemic, as explained by Potenza in her case study ‘Animation as a Medium to help clinicians understand the secondary healthcare experiences of patients’ (Atiogbe, 2021). It would be brilliant if what we have done as a small group could inform a rejuvenated healthcare CPD project which uses Digital Storytelling to helps towards more empathetic healthcare for prisoner patients, it would turn our group assignment into a reusable assignment with practical benefit for a real situation.

I have really enjoyed working with Ken, Paul and Potenza and would like to thank them for accommodating me as team leader.

References

Atiogbe, P. (2021) ‘Animation as a Medium to help clinicians understand the secondary healthcare experiences of patients’, Case study on H817 21B Blue group project website. Available at https://sites.google.com/view/h817-blue-group/research/case-studies/animation-as-a-medium (accessed 21 June 2021)

Hindle, P. (2021) ‘Is it the digital storytelling or the process that counts?’, Design process on H817 21B Blue group project website. Available at https://sites.google.com/view/h817-blue-group/design/design-patterns/pattern-digital-storytelling-or-process (accessed 21 June 2021)

Page, A. (2021) ‘First do no harm: developing an ethical process of consent and release for digital storytelling in healthcare’, Case study on H817 21B Blue group project website. Available at https://sites.google.com/view/h817-blue-group/research/case-studies/first-do-no-harm (accessed 21 June 2021)

Wagner, K. (2021) ‘Storytelling and professional learning: a phenomenographic study of students’ experience of patient digital stories in nurse education’, Case study on H817 21B Blue group project website. Available at https://sites.google.com/view/h817-blue-group/research/case-studies/storytelling-and-professional-learning (accessed 21 June 2021)

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York, Cambridge University Press)

Bibliography

H817 21B AC Blue group website https://sites.google.com/view/h817-blue-group/home


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Anna C Page

H817 Week 11 Activity 19 Implementing Connectivism

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Take the description of the short course on digital skills that you developed in Week 8 and recast it, so that it adopts a highly connectivist approach. Or, if you prefer, you could take this ‘Open education’ block as an example and recast it in a more connectivist model, or another course you have familiarity with. You should take each of the principles set out above and state how they are realised in your course, either as a general principle or by giving an example activity.

Blog your course outline, along with how the principles are realised.

Read and comment on some of the courses suggested by other learners. You might like to consider:

1.   whether you found connectivism useful

2.   whether connectivism was in conflict with the traditional concept of a course

3.   what it would be like to study or teach a course based around connectivism.


In Week 8, my proposed course was about “basic digital skills course for learners unfamiliar with using online technologies” (Page, 2021). Adding a strong element of connectivism to this course from the beginning could potentially be quite a leap for some of these learners, especially those whose previous experience of learning was more behaviourist or cognitivist in approach. Such learners may be seeking reassurance about their need to develop digital skills (some may be very keen while others might be skeptical) and may fear being overwhelmed by many conflicting opinions and approaches which could come from a connectivist network and prefer step by step guidance as “not all people are autonomous learners” (Kop & Hill, 2008) able to investigate without structured guidance.

A conundrum for connectivism is the issue that learners don’t know what they don’t know; learning to appraise and filter out what is not important for them to learn from the wealth of sources suggested via their connections takes time and experience, as does building the network connections.

I proposed the following topics for the basic digital skills course:

  • Week 1 Your digital hardware
  • Week 2 Navigating the internet
  • Week 3 Online communication skills
  • Week 4 Safety and privacy online
  • Week 5 Digital transactions

Recasting this into a predominantly connectivist approach is tricky though not impossible. I originally envisaged it as an online course with content guiding learners through a series of steps towards building their understanding and familiarity with the topics. Some activities might involve constructing knowledge on their own or with other learners. This would have made it a combination of behaviourist, cognitivist and constructivist approaches.

In connectivist mode, for learners who are beginners in the online world, the course might start with a small local group formed previously for other interests and meeting face-to-face (for example a local club). Some of the group identify the desire to learn more about online technologies to improve their digital skills, possibly to enhance a club activity. They may recently have acquired mobile devices and be tentatively finding their way around them, supporting each other as they go. Depending upon previous experience, some of the group may have more confidence and experience of digital technologies than others, know people who could demonstrate how to do particular processes and activities with the available hardware or have found suitable resources online which explain what to do.

As they become more confident with their digital skills, the group could form a social media group (e.g. using WhatsApp or Signal) to communicate with each other both about their newly found digital skills knowledge and their original face-to-face group interest. Some group members might join other online groups as they discover them and share some of their findings with the original group. Group members might do online searches to find courses and resources which are designed for building their digital skills and share the links with the group. Members may discuss and agree to use one or more of such online courses as a regular group activity (perhaps focusing on a different course topic each week or month, depending on their groups regular meeting pattern), with each person doing a course element at their own pace and using the group for support and encouragement. The learners would gradually build up their digital skills confidence as well as enhancing their search and connection building capabilities which could be applied to their group’s original interest too.

The above approach would meet the key principles of Connectivism set out by Siemans as follows:

Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.

The local group is likely to contain a diversity of opinions among its original members, gradually drawing upon wider connections will expose them to yet more diversity.

Learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources.

The description of how this group might approach learning digital skills is an iterative process of gradually encountering, demonstrating, and sharing new skills from different information sources, including other groups.

Learning may reside in non-human appliances.

Online guides and videos they discover may demonstrate specific topics of interest.

Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known.

Members of the group will need to have a willingness and capacity to learn and support each other as they discover new information.

Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.

Finding new information via searches and connections with other groups and sharing back with the group in a continuous cycle of selecting a topic, seeking information, new connections and sharing will nurture and maintain connections and learning.

Ability to see connections between fields, ideas and concepts is a core skill.

The approach will work for the group if members are willing to acknowledge that improving their digital skills will increase the variety of knowledge they can gain about their original group interest as well as build their digital skills and confidence.

Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.

In online searches for ‘how to do’ demonstrations, learners would look out for information about the currency of the online resource.

Decision making is itself a learning process.

The learners would be constantly evaluating and filtering information they discover in light of their previous understanding. They would use their connections to help choose what to learn and interpret meaning and relevance of incoming information.


Connectivism could be useful for this course of discovery because it would enhance and complement the learner group’s construction of knowledge about digital skills, they would be practicing both knowledge acquisition and participation (Sfard, 1998) while building their online communication skills. It may be daunting and overwhelming for the group to gradually discover and apply relevant digital skills without any single person with previous knowledge guiding them, it would depend upon the existing abilities and personalities in the group which direction their digital skills development might take. If everyone in the original group lacks digital skills and confidence it will be harder for them to get started, so they may need a teacher to provide guidance at the beginning (cognitivism) or they could use an existing online course as their scaffold for topics to cover. So a purely connectivist approach might not work for them. A blend of cognitivist, constructivist, behaviourist and connectivist might be a better approach.

 

References

Page, A. (2021) ‘H817 Week 8 Activity 8 An OER course’, Anna Page’s blog [blog] 27 March. Available at https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=236848

Kop, R., & Hill, A. (2008) ‘Connectivism: Learning theory of the future or vestige of the past?’ The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 9(3). Available at https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v9i3.523 (accessed 12 April 2021)

Sfard, A. (1998) ‘On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One’, Educational Researcher, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 4–13.


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