Frances Bell

David said

Actually, the practices that I am most often trying to promote are pedagogically based rather than technological .......

and .... The more I reflect on this, I realize that it requires more partipation from stakeholders at all levels. Certainly, this will come with time. I think many will be turned off by their eLearning and teaching experiences until this gains momentum.   

I wonder if the heart of the matter is ownership.  How difficult is it for you to enrol a teacher into your vision of practice that involves global collaboration?  This interest me greatly as I am working on a Collaboration Across Borders project that is trying to build a network of HE tutors willing to engage in global collaboration.  Our initial feedback indicates that tutors are very selective in their innovations because of the many demands on their time and enthusiasm.

I find myself wondering about the relationship between the innovator and the teacher who delivers the curriculum.   What does each party gain from this?  On our project the project partners have research interests in the collaborations but tutors without such research interests may be balancing the educational benefits of the collaboration against their personal costs of running the collaboration.

Ah well - gradual change has a lot to recommend it ! Plenty of time for reflective practice.

Great post Andy. I love that pragmatic definition of constructivism. If we extended it to social constructivism as "designing activities, sometimes in a social or group setting, which allowed a learner to build on existing knowledge" then I think we would find that this is what "good" teachers have always done, whether ot not they see themselves as applying a social constructivist pedagogy.  I was interested in what you said about taking ideas from moodle and applying them in a face to face setting.   Is that because you are fairly new to teaching, I wonder? You mentioned teacher training but didn't say when.

A teacher whose experience predates or excludes  IT and moodle would do it the other way around - take ideas that worked in a f2f setting and see how they can be adapted in an online setting.  Of course there are things that are best suited to f2f and others to online. The embodied learners (you, me, our students) live their lives on- and off-line (but mainly off-line) and what the teacher is interested in is the relationship between the designed activity and the learning that does or does not occur, sooner or later - does it work?

This is a really interesting thread and I do have some practical suggestions to make but first let me put myself in the position of one of the teachers David Le Blanc is trying to help (and I know from the sandbox web site that David has lots of useful ideas and strategies). 

Ok, I (in this persona) am an experienced professionally trained teacher who has taken time out of my busy work schedule to learn various IT packages and I think alot about how I teach and have managed to make improvements over the years. Now I am being asked to use new software and change my pedagogy.  This feels threatening and probably will involve me in a lot of work.  It calls into question what I have done in the past. I don't want to be seen as a Luddite (after all I have used IT) but I am beginning to feel somehow inferior and that I am losing control of my teaching environment.

I think that learning technologists trying to encourage teachers to adopt IT can experience this sort of clash of experience and expertise (who has these?). It occurred to me that it could be worth looking at an approach that came from the Annenberg project that pre-dates moodle (so doesn't include this as a class of software).  In the Worldware approach, viability is a key concept:

"Software is viable if it is used by enough people for a long enough period of time that all its investors (original developers, funders, publishers, institutional support staff, faculty, and students) can justly feel that they each have received an adequate return on their own investments in developing, acquiring, and/or learning to use the software. Rather than leaving anyone feeling burned out, cheated, or in any other sense a loser, viable software leaves the various players receptive to the next generation of software." http://www.learner.org/edtech/rscheval/vvs.html#order

So maybe a viable approach will be one that incorporates the teachers' skills in Word and Powerpoint (or whatever tools they use) as well as the possibilities offered by moodle. 

On the Collaboration Across Borders project we are setting a staff network for HE tutors to organise collaborative activities between students from different countries, and then hosting those international activities.  We are certainly engaged in community-building and collaborative content, and would welcome feedback.  You can find us at http://www.cabweb.net or directly to our test moodle portal at http://www.staff.isipartnership.net/moodle/ . We are about to move to a permanent moodle portal and will then be inviting moodlers to join us.

I agree with Chris that the highlighting of the article has been provocative and brought out some useful points.  Students experience moodle by using a specific implementation of it.  That experience includes configuration, content (supplied by teacher and those who contribute to forum), social policies, norms and interaction and will be very specific to the context.  If they experience something that troubles them, like loss of privacy, they may think that "moodle" determined that loss of privacy whereas it may be a subtle outcome of many of the above aspects.  I find that getting truthful student reaction to online and offline resources and activities is very helpful in improving practice and innovation.

Diana Laurillard talks about affordances of technology - I find that a helpful idea.