Ten Strategies for Building Community with Technology

Bernie Potvin, Nicki Rehn, David Peat

• Publisher: Brush Education
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781550595529
• eBook ISBN: 9781550595550
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Educators in online and other technology-rich environments consistently ask, "How can I build community among the learners in my class?" They know learning is strengthened by community, but aren't sure how to design a community in a learning environment where technology plays a significant role.

Ten Strategies for Building Community with Technology answers their question with proven strategies developed over the authors' thirty years' experience designing and teaching online classes. The ten strategies demonstrate that technology is not an impediment to community, but instead a tool for building more effective learning environments than are possible with traditional, face-to-face classrooms. Used the right way, technology can provide more instructional time, more opportunities for students to reflect, more chances to share and connect, and more access to feedback.

But these effective learning environments don't happen by chance. This book will give you all the background, tactics, examples and advice you need to design successful learning communities with technology.

Ten Models for Building Learning Communities

• Transmission/Direct Instruction
• Guided Discovery
• Nurturing
• Apprenticeship
• Case Study
• Shared Praxis
• Insight-Generating
• Training
• Projects
• Inquiry

Section II

---

Case Studies and Examples of Technology-supported Courses and Programs

Suggestions for Reading This Section

• Start by reading the scenario section of each model first. By doing so you will be able to connect the familiar (the teaching examples) with the unfamiliar, various, and perhaps new ideas found in each section.

• Look at the keywords section; be alert to reading these words in context throughout a section.

• If you are a practically minded, concrete sequential learner, then read the sections titled “How best applied?” With some concrete examples in mind, the rest of the section and the model’s description of examples will make better sense.

• Read the scenario again, together with the case studies provided in each section. Determine to call into question the scenario, to actively look to disaffirm or affirm the case study described in the scenario, based on your own teaching experience. By doing so, you will be cognitively engaged and in active intellectual engagement with the scenario.

• Read and try out the suggested URLs, online resources, and, if possible, books suggested for reading. There is definitely more to the story of teaching and learning than what can be included in each section.

• Read and consider the subheadings. These serve as useful advanced organizers to alert you to what you already know and to make sense of what you will read in the text that follows.

We don’t always think our way into a new way of acting, we act our way into a new way of thinking.

–Parker Palmer

Case Study and Example I

---

Transmission/Direct Instruction

Scenario

Students in Dr. Smith’s undergraduate political science class have been discussing censorship and how different countries have taken up the notion of censorship. The students have discussed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada, yet they still seem puzzled about why certain forms of artistic expression developed and used in private, including those depicting sexual relationships between children and adults, are permissible de facto by not being prosecuted. Most of Dr. Smith’s students, however, speak out in favour of people being able to do what they want “as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.” Dr. Smith recognizes that she has a teachable moment here, where students face a genuine tension, where most if not all students are able to say that they do not support any form of censorship even as they recognize and acknowledge that certain forms of behaviour (e.g., filming sexual torture and the killing of children) must be censored. She decides that the topic is important and compelling enough, that students are already engaged enough, that she could develop a series of lectures with guest speakers who would transmit various points of view on the topic of censorship. She decides to bring in a Catholic priest, a journalist, and an artist who would take up the topic and lecture on the place of government to decide what might be viewed and what might not be viewed. To ground the discussion in a concrete experience, she decides to introduce the coming lecture series by referring to (using the “hook” of) Howard Stern, the American shock talk–radio broadcaster whose shows include sexual activity broadcast live. Stern has just been given clearance to broadcast live in Canada on public radio. Dr. Smith also decides that the most effective way to organize the entire lecture series so that transfer of learning occurs is to ask students to prepare briefs (short summaries) for each of the three levels of government, with reference to specific persons in each level of government.

Background to transmission/direct instruction

Transmission is the presentation of content (information) to learners. Implicit in this perspective is that there exists a stable body of knowledge that can be “accurately and efficiently” (Apps, 1991, p. 40) delivered to learners. The emphases are on the teacher and the content to be transmitted, and how efficiently the teacher can be an “architect” of learning experiences through direct instruction. The teacher designs the transmission of content so that the content is represented faithfully to the learner. The teacher designs and implements the transmission of content so that it is efficiently and clearly organized and presented. Students reproduce the content in some form identical or similar to the original information (Apps, 1991, p. 41). The most commonly used transmission strategy is teacher talk or lecture. Other commonly used ways of organizing for presentation online and technology-supported information include presentation of print resources in some saved digital form, overheads projected on Smartboards, whiteboards, PowerPoint, books and handouts saved on a platform such as Moodle, websites, videos, pictures, and other visuals.

Keywords

• Instructional design – step-by-step, logical, and organized design of environments and learning experiences.

• Scaffolding – providing environments to assist learners to understand new content, dependent on previous content and learner understanding of previous content. For example, in order to scaffold a learner’s experience of learning, a teacher’s first learning activity online might be for students to introduce themselves and include three sentences in their online introduction: what they know about the topic of the course, what they want to know about the topic, and what approach or style of learning they will likely use to learn about the topic.

• Transfer of learning – learners transfer into their reception of transmitted content previous learning and transfer their learning to new or other situations (e.g., a workplace, a sport, a skill, an examination).

Indicators of success

When transfer of learning is evident, learners make connections with new content using previously learned content, and learners apply their learning to new situations with satisfactory to exemplary results. For example, students could document their emerging insights in a digital or online format. Each week they could post a three-part response: the main idea of the week’s readings (or discussions online), students’ main conclusions about the readings, and what remains fuzzy (Angelo & Cross, 1993).

How best applied

Using narrative in each designed learning experience is an effective way to include content or information that has been attended to over some period in the course. For example, teachers may ask students to post a shared journal entry each week, in which they identify when during the week they were most engaged and least engaged, and why. In addition, during direct instruction (transmission) online, teachers need to use some “hook” or motivator to draw students inductively into the content being transmitted. For example, teachers may use an anomaly or unusual event posted online to create cognitive dissonance (e.g., a child prodigy demonstrating a gift in a class on stages of development that ostensibly “all” children are typically supposed to follow).

Challenges to using transmission/direct instruction

Student prior learning may negatively influence transfer, which affects how a student makes new inferences, draws accurate conclusions, and makes valid interpretations. Information is often less reliably perceived and interpreted by learners than what might be expected or hoped for. Understanding of content that might be desired in transmission approaches may be less possible than what many teachers would hope for, in part because much learning may be more tied to specific cases—experiences that gave rise to memories (lingering effects of experiences in the learner’s long-term memory)—than to abstract content transmitted in skillful, organized ways (Pressley & McCormick, 1995). For example, teachers may question students early in a topic to assess misconceptions. Students could be asked to post a response to an “essential question” skillfully worded to tease out misconceptions. For example, at the University of Calgary I (Bernie Potvin) have asked graduate students in my learning-theory course this question: “What does it mean for children, ages 5 to 11 (approximately), to be concrete operational in their thinking, according to Jean Piaget?” Typically, most students respond that children need concrete experiences through which to learn. That answer, while true, is not the whole story. At the concrete operational–thinking stage, children make sense of new experiences through accessing the leftover or residual effects of their previous, concrete experiences, which are now lodged in their long-term memory stores. Once identified, the misconception about concrete-operational thinking can serve as a direction for additional direct instruction.

Opportunities to enhance the effectiveness of using transmission/direct instruction

Organize information (content) into bite-size chunks (so that no more than five to nine chunks of information have to be processed in a learner’s short-term memory within a five-to-ten-minute period); develop an architecturally sound framework for organizing content (e.g., teach facts by first teaching an organizing concept, one that provides learners an opportunity to pour meaning into the facts); transmit in a logical way, from general to specific or simple to complex, depending on the content; combine uses of transmission strategies so that each modality of learning (visual, auditory, and tactile) is used by each learner; differentiate transmission so that there are multiple entry points into the content (e.g., artistic learners can ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Outline of the Book
• How to Use This Book
• Section I: Description of the 10 Models Proposed for Designing Courses and Programs
• Section II: Case Studies and Examples of Technology-supported Courses and Programs
• Section III: Suggestions for How to Design and Implement a Model’s Learning Experiences
• Section IV: Questions to Guide Design of Technology-enhanced Learning Environments
• Works Cited
• Appendix I Glossary of Terms
• Appendix II Principles of Learning and Planning
• Appendix III Digging Deeper: Nurturing, Shared Praxis, and Apprenticeship
• Appendix IV Overview of Models
• Appendix V Additional Reading