electro-textual

The fabulous choc-o-Nancy White was speaking about all manner of things today, including:

• how to facilitate in a massive online course, and the implications of trust in large networks;
• the range of identity and boundary from the personal, through communities to networks;
• new and emerging roles and practices;
• the value of “appreciative change”, which is related to the appreciative inquiry championed by Marie Jasinski and Maret Staron in ’07 research. Recognise people’s strengths as a starting point for the learning process.

Ideas came up around the responsibility of adult learners in a course such as this. In small groups teaching adult literacy, for example, we might gradually teach people how to become more responsible for their own learning, through explicit instruction, groupwork activities and reflective discussion.

But here, in a massive course involving educators, there was a suggestion earlier that participants would already have the skills of self-directed learning. Is this true, and would it change the demands on our facilitators? Of course it would .. in this environment you model other ways to cross-connect, eg forums, comments on blogs, using the chat in live sessions etc ..

Here are Nancy’s slides:

Christy Tucker posted her summary of the earlier session;
and so did Diego Leal.

Thanks to all these people for sharing their knowledge ;-]