A couple of slow weeks in the Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment, so this isn't so much of a reflective post, it's more of a catch-up catch-up on the posts I have managed to do...
One thing I've been trying to do in these summary posts is to reflect on how the 'uncourse blog experiment' might be used to inform lightweight (in production terms) future OU course development. So here are some thoughts on that...
(The following is taken from discussions around the Visual Gadgets uncourse blog, which I set up to draft materials for a chunk of course where I'm one of many people on the course team.)
The following desirable characteristics may follow from the blog form:- the tone tends to be informal;
- the delivery is episodic, with individual posts standing alone as well as part of an ongoing narrative;
- blogs tend be focus on a general theme, as well accommodating series of special topic posts, or multi-part posts on a specific topic.Blogged course strands might optionally run over several weeks as once or twice a week standalone 500-1000 word blog posts, so that students who can cope with context switching (studying more than one chunk/strand at once) can opt to do this chunk via a feed subscription. The rationale here is to explore different publishing models that support potentially innovative ways of embedding skills development in daily behaviour
For example, the Digital Worlds uncourse blog is quite a mix of posts if you look at it in (reverse) chronological order, though there are some narrative strands running through it. However, posts on a theme can be pulled together in a different display surface to show 'minicourses' by topic (that is, "chunks"), as the Digital Worlds Pageflakes reaggregation demo shows.
These topics are things we might traditionally write and deliver as standalone, linear chunks. But they were actually produced and delivered via the blog in a parallel and piecemeal fashion. And for learners who may have a daily web ritual that includes visiting a content aggregation site - a Google personal page, or feed reader for example - this mode of delivery (that is a, a daily chunk, via an RSS feed) may allow them to accommodate a 5-30 minute learning experience into that habit.
The use case of students allocating large blocks of time to OU study is one that we know works, and is likely to continue. I suspect many students also carry course materials around for opportunistic study, over a coffee break for example. But e.g. in my own life, I don't have my days structured in a way that would allow me to take 2 hours out for an OU course. Though if i have conveniently packaged learning materials to hand, I may have 2-3 x 5x20 minutes chunks of time free to study opportunistically.
What I want to explore is a limit case of such opportunistic study, where the learning materials are also packaged and delivered in a discrete, portable way, a bit like publishing content from breakout boxes in print materials on small 'prayer cards' for example, that the student can easily fit in a pocket and taken out and consume in a quick hit whenever the opportunity arises. What's interesting me at the moment are the ways we can structure, as well as disaggregate, some of our materials to support the publication of 'microchunks' and explore what the web versions might look like.
(There's a whole other opportunity too which is the design of conversational learning opportunities, where you try to find natural ways of introducing a learning activity into someone's daily online social activity on a social network. How do we package learning activities so that someone chatting to a friend and fellow student in myspace might then switch from chatting about coronation street to something course related? Or how do we package the learning activity so it drives them to their social network (we already do this with "post your thoughts on the conference" type instruction, so this would just be the next step?)
PS I noticed today that the OU is hosting Researching Learning in Virtual Environments - ReLIVE08 in November. I actually received the call from a colleague unassociated with the event who forwarded me the call from a JISCmail mailing list. Once again, it reminds me that there's nothing like sharing knowledge in the OU ;-) (i.e. knowledge sharing is BROKEN... which makes me think - maybe like Will? - that we need to address deeper concerns than considering buying stuff like this...;-)
Tags: digitalworlds
Posted by ajh59 at May 20, 2008 01:38 PM