Well, it appears that the blog prompts are a bit off of the current status of the class; which is no problem, really. Things change and rearrange as the semester goes. It is often quite irritating to be in a course that still forces everyone into the pre-arranged schedule no matter what happens. SO, since we still are working on the proto-type and have not had a change to submit it to peers for feedback, I will focus on reflecting on where we are at now with the prototype.

Of course, there really is not much of a prototype to blog on right now. Our group seems to be experiencing the fragmentation that happens to groups that stay together for a while. Some members seem to be busy with other projects right now, while others seem to be on completely different pages. Reining this in over the next couple of weeks may prove to be a major undertaking.

Luckily, we do have someone in the group that can work on the technical side of the prototype. I knew all along that we would need some kind of LMS or CMS or something to put the prototype in. But my fear was that since I have some experience with installing and running Moodle and WordPress, that this duty would also fall to me. But we have a Joomla expert in the group… or at least someone that knows how to do Joomla and has a server for us to use. That is awesome. I don’t know enough about Joomla to know if it will work in the long run for learning, but I know that people have made it work in other situations, so it should work just fine.

I think the biggest task ahead will be pulling everything together into a cohesive unit. We are still all so new to sociocultural learning that it is hard to keep that paradigm in focus. We (including myself here) seem to keep drifting back to the basic, standard course and lesson structures. Hopefully we will pull everything away from that enough to get fully into the sociocultural realm.

Assessment is also a tough nut to crack in the sociocultural world. Somehow, numeral grades do not seem to be appropriate for this course. Are you really going to score a personal success plan? How do you assign a letter grade to creating a personal learning network? I am thinking that rubrics will just be a basic way to rate different areas – something like “excellent”, “acceptable”, and “improve”. Then we tell students that they need to get at least “acceptable” in all lines of all rubrics to complete the course. Sounds a little open-ended, but  maybe that is what will make it advanced?

Reading Notes:

Click here to read my notes for this week on Evernote

—

So far the feedback we have received is just from the peer groups. I think maybe we are now a bit behind from the Schoology calendar? In general, the peer feedback was very good – other than they seemed to have a huge beef with blogging. Three short reflection assignments were labeled as “too much” by a few. We left those in as we felt that it would help the students reflect on their progress as well as give their mentors and/or major professors a good window into how they were doing on in the course. There were also considerable questions about finding people to teach this course or to serve as mentors. That was a weird one for us, as the same questions could be leveled against our peer groups design document. But usually, when you get to the design part of creating a course, whoever is hiring you to design already has that in place (or at least a plan to get them in place). There was also one set of feedback from some that just didn’t like our idea, sociocultural theory, or open-ended processes in general. Most of that feedback seemed to be based on just telling us how much they didn’t like it with little constructive feedback (or at least little that just wasn’t a repeat of what other people had said).

All of this did lead us to clarify our document to point out that the mentors will be selected and motivated by the department, and the other work was designed to help the major professor know their students better and not add work. I also attended a session about surviving the PhD process that really opened my eyes to see that there is a need for this course to be a reality.

We are just starting to work through how to structure the prototype. I envision it to be a self-paced course or group on Schoology or Moodle or something like that. We need to discuss more as a group, and that may change. But in there would be a basic set of brief modules that introduces all of the parts of the PHD program that students need to be successful.  Questions and concerns would be addressed to social networking tools that are already in place. Students would be directed on how to start a Personal Learning Network or Informal Cohort to help with the rest of the assignments, and then the rest of the course would be a series of benchmarks for students to check their progress through creating their plans. Our design document really helped us clarify the order much of this would happen and what goes where in the course.

As of now, we are still clarifying our roles in the creation of the prototype. I seem to still be leading this process – never was elected to do that, but I seem to be the one that is getting the ball rolling. I am comfortable with that, but I would feel better if there were quicker responses to the emails I send out and people were stepping up to take on different parts of the prototype. That is what is difficult so far – I wonder if my group understands that there are only 4-5 weeks left and they all need to step up and take a significant part of the prototype or else it just won’t get done. Now, we all get along great and I don’t have any personality problems with anyone on the team. We just need everyone to step up and say “I will take on ______.”

As far as the prototype itself, the main concern is just collecting the information. We don’t want to get to the presentation and have someone ask “ummmm…. Why is there nothing in here about publications” or some other major part that we just missed because we were pushing so fast. That is my biggest concern – missing a big piece because we get tunnel-visioned on a smaller piece that is hard to figure out.

Reading Notes:

Click here to read my notes for this week on Evernote

—

As of today, our instructional design is getting cleaned up and revised based on peer feedback. Hopefully we will have it ready to turn in today, also. But group work always tends to move slower than I would like, so that may not happen.

What has gone well? For starters, we have discussed many aspects surrounding a sociocultural lesson design. Our discussions go well with no major personality clashes. Although, several group members are rather quiet, so I hope they don’t end up causing conflict when they do speak up. The design is taking shape and there are some great ideas in there. I went to a seminar on “Surviving the PhD Process” this week and much of what was shared there confirmed what we are doing. Many students expressed the need to form an informal cohort to help survival rates. We are labeling that a Personal Learning Network, but it is still the same idea.

Our problems with the process so far still revolve around group participation. We have several members that aren’t really joining in the discussion or revision of the material. I think they are sitting back and waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Well, the Master’s Level student is asking what to do, but I’m not sure if we know what to have him do. He already stated he doesn’t understand anything about what we are doing, and when we ask him what he wants to do, he usually throws out a particular technical skill that he has learned that won’t really fit the project. Some of these are great skills to have, but they tend to lean towards video screen capture, and we won’t really be using that. Overall, I’m just not sure what to do with people that can’t at least come up with a good idea for their own participation. I am used to having several people in a group that can and want to do several functions and then we as the group have to decide who will the best for each task. When I say “hey, we need someone to do this by the end of the week” and no one responds and then finally they come back at the end and ask “what should I do?”… not sure what to do with that.

But going forward from here, as we get into production of the prototype – this may all change. I get that we have only really had one real task up until now – design the instruction. Once we get into developing it (uh oh – just can’t seem to avoid ADDIE, huh?), I can see where there would be a large number of various tasks for different people to take on. So maybe I just need to realize that as an instructional designer by trade, that the past few weeks have been my major contribution to the project and in the next phase others will step up.

Going forward, we might also need to narrow our focus even more. We have been doing that, but even looking at what we have may be a bit too much to handle in the few weeks left. We shall see what the doc has to say about that.

Reading Notes:

Click here to read my notes for this week on Evernote

—

What I am excited about our instructional design project is to see how a constructivist based lesson works from a design stand point. Almost every course I have worked on has been from primarily an empirical viewpoint, focusing on papers, blog posts, and standardized testing. We picked an interesting topic to tackle – one that does not lend itself well to stereotypical design. Hopefully that is what will make it advanced instructional design. So ultimately I am excited to get to do something outside of the box.

What am I nervous about for this project? Sometimes I worry that we might have bit off more than we can chew. There are so many parts that could go into this – from outreach to potential students to alumni engagement. Thankfully we decided to focus on new students to the program. It has also been a bit difficult to get my team to stay on schedule with the initial steps. I had hoped we would get our feedback for the other team to them by today, but today is almost over and that doesn’t look to happen. We also have a silent member or two, and that makes me nervous when one or two need to step out and do something. I guess I somehow fell into the defacto leader position for the group. Or at least, I am the one prodding and emailing and reminding and initiating. I am also concerned with how we will integrate the feedback from the other group. Most of it was pretty good, but one was definitely more personal opinion from a completely different paradigm than what we are going for. I can see what Warren was referring to when he talks about making sure you review stuff from the same paradigm it was written for. When someone doesn’t, it makes it hard to figure out what the hell they are talking about.

My personal vision for the project: to become something that is different in scope and design than the typical “lesson” that comes from the ADDIE process. I want to fully embrace socio-cultural theory in a way that would almost create a true culture that people want to be a part of, not just one where they are a part of it because they applied for and were accepted to a certain program. Of course, that vision is beyond the scope of what we are doing for the project, but who knows? Maybe it will catch on. We have thought about some of the tools that would make this community work that don’t currently exist (online profile system, student peer mentoring system, etc). So far we are thinking that the creation of those might be outside of the scope of this project, meaning we may have to assume they exist for the sake of the project even though they don’t. But it would still be cool to see those things come into existence also. But to be more practical, my ultimate vision for this project is to create a high quality lesson that displays advanced instructional design techniques.

Reading Notes:

Click here to read my notes for this week on Evernote

—