Engaging online learners 2

Photo from Pxhere

In my previous blog post I remarked that engaging learners can be difficult in any context, but is often harder in online environments. Today, as many of us attempt to teach online, it's often that case that a lot of our energy is expended on keeping students focused and engaged - and at a distance. I also mentioned a very useful model that promotes creative, collaboration online writing.

From Gunawardena (1995) we get this five phase model. It can be adapted for a number of contexts, especially to promote various kinds of collaborative learning.

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.

I wrote back in 2009 about how I had used the model to frame my own efforts to engage online learners, in wikis - collaborative web pages. Here's how I created engaging activities:

The first simple activity has been used both as a warm-ip activity for new groups and as a means of familiarising students with the topography of the wiki space. Students are asked to introduce themselves with a few words about their personal interests and background. They are also asked to post an image which they think best represents themselves. A mix of photographs, cartoons and inanimate objects or animals is the result. This activity is a phase 1 activity and involves minimum social interchange. (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 2 by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's