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September 28, 2005
Questioning Strategies in Online Courses
I attended an interesting workshop yesterday titled “Questioning Strategies” offered by the Center for Teaching Excellence at UIUC. The presenters were David H. Curtis, Ph.D. and Ina Claire Gabler, Ph.D.; from Engaged Minds Professional Development.
Using Bloom’s taxonomy, or Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, as a framework, Curtis and Gabler described a technique using questioning that stimulates learners to think critically and to express their thinking in dialogue. In a nutshell, the technique is based on sequencing different types of questions (what Curtis and Gabler refer to as Triggers, Probes, and Redirects) in Question Clusters to strengthen critical thinking skills. The Question Clusters focus on the various levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. For example, question clusters might help establish knowledge base, establish comprehension and application, or prompt for critical thinking.
In our workshop yesterday, Gabler and Curtis led the 20 or so participants in a discussion of this painting
The questions by the facilitator (Gabler) helped us establish base facts (e.g. what are the focal point of actions, what is the central figure), establish comprehension and application (e.g. what is the possible story in the scene), and engage in critical thinking (e.g. what are some symbolic interpretations of the scene). To wrap up, the facilitator revealed the painting’s title and asked us to compare our suggested titles with the artist’s title.
Can we use this didactic technique in an online course? Certainly, the activity can be successfully replicated in a Synchronous Learning Environment (SLE) like Elluminate. But one criticism I have of this activity, whether it is done face-to-face or online in a SLE, is that each individual student might not have sufficient time to think about the questions posed. Curtis mentioned yesterday how important it is to provide “wait time” after a question has been posed in order to allow for the “Ah Ha!” moment to occur. However, it is often difficult for the facilitator to allow sufficient wait time in a “live” environment – the dead space can be awkward and some students will offer their answers before other students have had time to formulate their own. But if we convert this activity into an asynchronous discussion, what could be completed in half-an-hour live might take a week in the threaded discussion board,
Gilly Salmon, in her book “e-tivities: the key to active online learning,” writes “As a rough rule of thumb, I’d suggest what might take half an hour with a group of 10 face to face might take one week elapsed time online, if each participant came back three times, read other people’s messages and posted three of his or her own.”
Salmon proposes a five-step model (Access and Motivation, Socialization, Information Exchange, Knowledge Construction, and Development) (See a Book Review)
I would like to try to an activity using a combination of asynchronous and synchronous tools, perhaps using asynchronous discussion board for the first three stages in Salmon’s model, and then using a synchronous discussion via Elluminate for the Questioning Strategies presented by Curtis and Gabler, and wrap up using both asynchronous and synchronous for Salmon’s stage 5 (Development).
Posted by at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2005
Conference Podcasts a Standard?
In his OLDaily Blog on 9/22/05, Steven Downes asks "How long before the conference podcast becomes standard and before people routinely start posting the audio of their talks on their own websites? How long after this before transcripts become standard as well?"
I hope that FSI 2006 will feature several podcasts of presentations, all of which would have transcripts.
I first started thinking about how FSI could start to integrate blogs and podcasts when I read Alan Levine's "I'm Bored As Hell And I;m Not Gonna ....... zzzzz" posted on Monday, March 7th, 2005, in which he complains about the stale format of the League for Innovations (and most other educational conferences.) Someone replied to Levine's post, with the following (which, unfortunately, is no longer available on Levine's Blog)
A nice fellow sits in the front row with a "I'm blogging this" T-shirt, taking notes and writing a blog entry ready to go live just after the speech.another nice chap is recording the presentation as podcast/videocast. If budget allows, the whole thing is streamed live.
Now we have to think about the importance of the network as a technical medium. Most important issue is to enable transparency: two-way communication.
Wlan in setup in the conference room. All participants in the room can access the wlan, join an online IRC room through the conference website for a chat about the boring speaker: "what was that supposed to mean?". Of course the whole chat is projected to a second screen in the conference room for others to follow as well.
Now, people can follow the conference from the web, talk with people in the actual conference room and ask questions through the second screen. Two-way, baby.
The conference has a wiki where presenters may put their stuff and conference attendees may combine their ideas about the presentation. Links to external bloggers will be provided as well in addition to official conference blog. The official blog is used the same way as I'm using Flosse Posse right now, providing pre-reading material, interviews and analysis just before the conference.
Bloggers and podcasters go around tables in informal coffee breaks and ask people about their impressions. The most valued ideas are recorded and shared outside of the conference room.
The ideas attendees may have are now recorded and continue to live their own life on the web after the conference.
I imagine that we will see a lot of blogs, podcasts, and rss feeds featured at educational conferences in 2006. Whether or not they will be done effectively remains to be seen.
Posted by at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)