In a seminar being run by Prof Steve Wheeler which is posing some interesting questions re blogging, collaboration and sharing ."In the act of writing ...we are written" (Chandler). Perhaps a reason why people don't or won't blog? There's a risk to putting it out there.. what might others think about what you've written? I'm even going back through this and correcting the punctuation...
Front stage and backstage roles - what persona do you present to your 'readers'? I certainly engage online 'in awareness' but that involves a level of digital fluency or literacy that perhaps young people haven't developed.
Lessig- "Blogging ..is the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have" - it allows us to put our thoughts out there. It's not always unchoreographed though because in HE we often instruct students to blog or reflect on specific things. Perhaps this doesn't work sometimes because it's forced in some way?
Paragogy: peer support is becoming an emergent property in HE - how does this challenge Vygotsky's ZPD and the role of knowledgeable others? Collaboration and sharing online enables peer and individual support in ways that haven't been seen before. However, what happens when it's not supportive and becomes destructive or oppressive?
I think that is a really interesting question to pose, Jane. Could you expand a bit on what you mean by destructive and/or oppressive?
ReplyDeleteA number of things really... If learners aren't skilled at giving or receiving feedback, they might come over as bullies, negative or unsupportive perhaps. There is an issue here in terms of the assumptions that we might make about their ability to collaborate, negotiate or give constructive feedback. There is also the question of learners' confidence to engage in this way: a negative experience could be destructive in that they stop engaging.
ReplyDeleteI asked a group of learners to find out some information last year by posing a question on a particular website to a particular community of educators. The online community was very critical of the questions asked (some seemed quite naive perhaps) and how they were being asked, and did not support the learners to rephrase or to engage further. The learners' confidence was quite knocked by this experience: I was disappointed that the 'educators' who were already online seemed so intolerant and weren't more supportive.