Engaging online learners 1

Photo by Steve Wheeler

Engaging learners can be difficult in any context. Engaging them in online environments can amplify the problem. You're not in the room to intervene, and behaviour management is much more of a concern when you're separated from your students. It's not as if you can run down the corridor and bang a few heads together. All you have is your voice. And perhaps your social presence, if you know how to invoke it.

From my experience in traditional classrooms lack of engagement, and its cousin, low-level disruptive behaviour, are often the result of boredom. When it has happened in the past, I have asked myself how I can make my sessions more engaging. There are many, many ways to do this of course, and in this series of blog posts I will aim to explore a few methods that I have tried with success in engaging my own students. Let's start with collaborative online spaces.

Below is an extract from a book chapter I wrote several years ago. It relates to critical writing on wikis, but it can be applied to just about any collaborative online learning space:

There is a spectrum of wiki activities that can be used to encourage critical thinking in writing. In order to rationalise activities within such a collaborative space, it is prudent to identify a framework within which activities can be defined. Perhaps one of the most useful frameworks is offered by Gunawardena (1995) in which five phases of knowledge construction within shared collaborative learning environments were identified:

Phase 1: The sharing or comparing of information
Phase 2: Discovery and exploration of dissonance and inconsistency among ideas, concepts or statements by different participants
Phase 3: Negotiation of meaning and co-construction of knowledge
Phase 4: Testing and modification of proposed synthesis or co-construction
Phase 5: Phrasing of agreement, statements and application of newly constructed meaning.

Several activities have been used often in recent wiki based learning with my trainee teachers and it is possible to locate these within the phases proposed by Gunawardena and her colleagues (Wheeler, 2009, p 487).

Read more in the next post. 

References
Gunawardena, C. (1995) Social presence theory and implications for interaction and collaborative learning in computer conferences. International Journal of Educational Technologies, 1 (2/3), 147-166.
Wheeler, S. (2009) Destructive creativity on the social web. In S. Hatzipanagos and S. Warburton (Eds.) Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies. Hershey, NY: Information Science Reference.

Engaging online learners 1 by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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