This week I have been struck by the work of one of the course participants, Florence Lyons. Florence is a French teacher working with Year 11 students in New Zealand. She has been telling me that her students are very interested in being part of an online event where they can tell their stories...have teachers listen to them...where they can be themselves and not "the pupil". I am really looking forward to watching how Florence facilitates this in the online environment.On Wednesday we joined Greg Walker and iFacilitate to think about how to facilitate asynchronous conversations in discussion forums or email groups. Greg passed on some excellent strategies for starting and developing conversations and discussion, asking strategic questions and supporting critical thinking. We also learned about the Six Thinking Hats approach to group discussion and individual thinking from Sebastian. And Greg gave us a really useful link to Fran Peavey's work: Strategic Questioning Manual
Here is the recording (I will make the mp3 available on the course wiki on Monday):
Have a great weekend, Sarah
Image: 'Reading at the demo 2'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/62752875@N00/118170753
1 comment:
Great topic because online can indeed be clunky...the rubric was great to think about evaluating and monitoring the interactions. Could even be applied to Facebook!
Also, the thinking hats and strategic thinking resources lend themselves well for action learning cycles.
I think this is the difference between learning (to complete a class) and muddling along doing something collaboratively (and learning as you go because you need to or want to see it happen)
I suspect there's a big facilitation difference between class (need inclusive participation), work (theoretically sharing workload/ participation), volunteer (people already want in) worlds. . .
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