I was going to write this post anyway, but as it turns out, it’s the final assignment for the class to write a personal reflection. Bonus!
I only took one class this summer, but it was a doozy. The entire class was, as a friend describes it, very “meta.” Learning about Computer Supported Collaborative Learning while in a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning environment is an interesting way to study problems and possible solutions. It was very nice studying with (mostly) educators and programmers – I’m starting to think every library program should require a few classes outside the program.
The best part of the course was working collaboratively with my group (who were awesome) to design a lesson, which two groups of fellow students completed. Although the process was rushed, I really got a kick out of watching others complete an assignment I made. It made me think seriously about teaching someday.
We had a lot of technical difficulties during the course. The instructor experimented with having us do an assignment in Quaq, a commercial build of the open source program Croquet. The main problem with the program, I thought, was that it did not have enough computing resources behind it to do what we were supposed to do with it. At first, the built in VIOP feature crashed it. Then having 20 instances of Open Office open inside the program crashed it. Once we moved everything over to text, it was much better. I don’t t think the assignment (which involved reading and collaboratively evaluating stories written by other students) was one that was particularly well suited to Quaq, but I’m glad we used it, even with the technical difficulties. It made me think a lot about how we need to think very carefully before using new technologies with students, especially distance students, unless we require very specific hardware to be in the program.
I had a repeat of the Quaq technical difficulties when one of my group’s wiki’s (which I hosted on my own website) went down several times over two days. My web server it usually pretty stable, but I guess it’s Murphy’s law that the site will go down when I really need it. I saved student’s work as they completed it into Google Notebook and when my server went down the third time, I decided to move it over to PBWiki. What I took away from this and the Quaq experience is: always have a backup, and be prepared to move quickly to put it in place.
One of student made lessons my group completed was an evaluation of 3D, asynchronous, and synchronous learning systems. It was kind of fun being able to imagine what the future of learning environments might be like- we envisioned a combination synchronous/asynchronous program with plugin capabilities, sort of like Sakai on steroids. It gave me hope that in the future we will build learning systems that won’t cause the frustrations Jennifer experienced. This was my first time using Sakai, and I found it far superior to Blackboard (though I could certainly suggest a few improvements.)
Overall, I’m very happy I took the class. It reaffirmed my growing desire to work in distance education – and to work to make it better.