This has been a week of two halves:
(i) in the early days there was the struggle with finding the right community, and the uncertainty of and frustrations with the subject matter, and
(ii) towards the end of the week the anticipation of seeing what the fellow students have produced, thus sharing in their experiences.
This has been group work of a different kind, where one works in the dark, on one’s own terms, for quite some time and as isolated as you can get in an online environment; all communication comes nearly to a standstill - it’s only at the end that the veil of uncertainty is lifted in the sharing process.  In my experience one has to be an advanced online learner to cope with and manage this approach effectively and it may not necessarily be suitable for a novice online learner.
Nevertheless it is an interesting formative feedback concept the tutors have come up with and I can see and appreciate its effectiveness in learning.
In most traditional formative assessments only the learner and the tutor are involved, on a one-to-one basis, without the power of peer learning being tapped into.
For this week 7 has been an interesting learning experience.

After having completed my digital ethnographic project I had to give myself a break from the studies for one day but I then found myself getting very excited about finding out what my fellow students have come up with and how they would identify online communities.
What I found was so intriguing that I felt immediately the urge to make comments on most of those I’ve read.
Most fellow students appear to have already been members of online communities for some time and were thus more familiar with this concept and its workings than I was/am?
I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of choice although funnily enough the Irish theme did seem to show through more strongly. This diversity was also reflected in the way these communities appear to function, from the potentially confrontational, eerie (Sleeping cats), esoteric (Davidsfarm), commune-type (Bankeyfields Estate) to the embodied RP type (Virtual Dublin).
I personally not having experienced online communities before found their studies very interesting, not the least as it clearly demonstrates both the desire /necessity of people to communicate online but also the effectiveness of this environment for social dialogue.
Obviously the depth of bonding differed but its effectiveness is beyond doubt, and I have to admit that that Rheingold’s statements on virtual communities ‘as a bit like a neightbourhood pub of coffeeshop’ (cited in Bell) are probably not too far of the mark, despite the fact that it did not show so clearly in my particular community – but then this was driven by professional skills and not leisure.
In my view it would be an interesting extension of this study to find out whether there is a (positive) correlation between being an effective online ’social networker’ and one in RL ? Or in other words is participation on both platforms just a generic skill or are the two mutually exclusive?

Well – it’s done and it can be viewed here – apologies for the delay.

What a gestation and what a difficult birth – Caesarian or what?

It has been a roller-coaster and mainly downhill…  This was mainly Terra Incognita to me and as such this has been a difficult and arduous journey. For reasons stated in previous postings I find the subject area very difficult to adapt to and to digest and this took time.
The ensuing time constraints explain my rather unambitious approach to (i) picking the topic and (ii) choosing the medium.

On the positive side though it forced me to do something which I have not done before namely look at an online community more formally, critially and scrutinise more deeply how it works and what people do online and this has been very useful. Doing this on a platform which I intend to use more frequently in my profession is an added bonus.

So overall great relief and a little bit of pride to have done it, not an all-singing-all-dancing piece of work but nevertheless an achievement in itself.

As part of my student and staff training program in the use of learning technology I have decided to undertake a micro-study on participants in ‘how staff and students actually learn‘, with the questions losely centred around Howard Gardner’s learning modalities as they may apply in teaching and learning in our institution.

Five identical  questions were put forward to (i) all student freshers during their VLE induction,  (ii) all staff via an online questionnaire and (iii) mainly younger staff attending a f2f training workshop, using an electronic voting system. The two staff questionnaires contained an extra question about their age profile from which the mean age of the cohort was calculated (colours blue and red below, student mean age was 20).

The five questions put forward were all along the theme: How do you learn best? ,providing five answer choices as indicated in the graph below (on the x-axis, y-axis is given in %); preference for maths served as ‘negative control’.

There are several interesting though not necessarily unexpected trends apparent:

• There is a relative and steep decline in the preference for ”learning by reading as the average age decreases
• Learning by oral presentations (classical instructivism) is largely consistent between the different age groups but at a surprisingly low level
• There is a clear shift from ‘learning by reading’ to ‘visual learning’ from the 45 year age group to both the 35 and 20 year average age group
• There is a further shift from ‘visual learning’ to ‘multimedia-based learning’ (movie/animation) from the 35 year to the 20 year age group.

This study is very much in line with expectation from the Digital Native/Digital Immigrant/Digital Luddite debate endorsing the notion of a gulf between modes of teaching  of the older generation of academic staff and the learning modes of their  students. Younger teaching staff can bridge this divide to some extend but still fall short of catering fully for the students’ expectations.
It endorses the important role the use of new media can play in supporting learning but requires teaching staff to improve their media competency and students to enhance their media literacy.

We are now largely through the Digital Ethnography project – and I should have created some sort artefact/study on an online community of my choice - but I’m struggling.
I’m struggling with the entire part possibly because it is so remote from my everyday experiences. I have a limited personal experience of social online networks and communities (see previous posting) and I also struggle making sense of the Hines and Bell articles.
For me they are highly theoretical and overly verbous such that I’m unable to make use of them in my project.
I’m also not a social anthropologist and I’m not even a social scientist – my research methodology is experimental based on hypotheses.
So I will keep on struggling and I will put something together but it will probably be not very original nor innovative – and for that I want to apologise in advance.