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

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