A day late… but here it is!…

THIS WEEK’S TOPIC
WK5 – This week we’ll be discussing the design of collaborative learning environments, particularly the work of Dan Suthers.

BLOG POSTS AND ACTIVITY
Jennifer provided a great summary of one of WK 4’s articles (Zhang, Scardamalia, Reeve & Messina, 2009)
Stian reflected on both of this week’s readings (both Scardamalia and Stahl) as well as the model we experimented with in our latest piratepad meeting (breaking off into smaller Skype discussion groups).
Monica played around with Tony Buzal’s iMindMap in first attempts to trace the landscape of main ideas generated in the course so far.
However, this week much of the back and forth went on in the actual WK4 Knowledge Building page, so check it out!

RESOURCES
No new resources this week! (If I’m wrong about this please correct me! add a comment with a link, thx)

WHERE WE’RE HEADED
We’re at quite an interesting point in the course. Right at the halfway point of our 8 weeks, we’ve generated quite a few ideas for collaborative output/artifact for the course, including

• Manifesto
• CSCL ‘Food Court’ (leading to a ongoing CSCL community, an extension and expansion of this course)
• Zotero Group
• possible group wiki (yet to be created)

We’ve also had some issues arise, including:

• Feelings of disorientation around the amount of readings
• Feelings of confusion around output/artifact – will we actually create a ‘finished’ artifact?
• Ambivalence around badges – do we have enough time? What is the criteria upon which evaluation will be based?

To which we’ve decided:

• Designate one central reading, list the rest as recommended.
• Create a “meeting agenda” page to help set meeting content and give opportunities for people to congregate around artifacts they want to spend their time on.
• Build a consensus about the place of badges in our course (please contribute to the discussion!)

Conversations around these issues are ongoing, please visit the various pages to contribute!

That’s all for this bi-weekly…have a great week everyone!