Woah! How did a month go by? Still trying to get the timing of taking two courses down. Just when I can celebrate a win like getting good grade on a paper, another deadline whizzes by! Still trying though!
I just finished the Harasim chapter on OCL. I was very curious to read about why the internet needs completely new theories of learning. I'll have to do some more reading on it and I'm wondering what Constructivists have to say about OCL. It seems to me that Harasim has drawn a line in the sand between these theories that I'm not sure all Constructivists would draw. I'm not going to do a book report on the whole theory as I imagine there are a lot of those. I want to focus on some of my questions. My first question is, in trying to imagine how this would apply at different levels, it seems to me like this fits education at a very advanced level. Learners building knowledge as a group seems like a pretty advanced skill. Harasim compares this type of knowledge to scientists who build on each other's knowledge as a group and create and guide new knowledge built on what already exists. I totally agree with this as I have experienced this in person- I interpret with a Deaf doctor at a research hospital and he's putting together research on pancreatic cancer. And building knowledge is exactly what he's doing. Also not by himself. He works with a physicist, a radiologist, a statistician, two other doctors, etc. I watch them build knowledge once a week in their meetings. But it's VERY advanced work and the scientists already know what the "canon" of knowledge is in pancreatic cancer. Because they are so advanced is why this kind of learning works. Would this work with first year med students who don't know anything? I see that as an open question. My second question is, it seems like Harasim is saying that a discussion board is a pretty good OCL technology. It just doesn't seem like that to me. Through the whole build-up of what OCL is, I kept thinking, "a discussion board can't do this." Harasim mentions 2 technologies I've never heard of, VirtualU and V groups, as well as Knowledge Forum. They seem to have been invented in the 90's and I've never heard of them so I wonder what happened to them. KF used scaffolding in a group discussion setting that seemed to be able to bring discussion from just individual posts into those IO and IC pieces of OCL that discussion boards don't do. I think in theory people could organize information and create information in discussion boards, but it never happens in reality. Everyone makes an individual post and other people reply and basically say "nice job" or don't reply at all. I know I'm guilty of it. And that way there is no organization- no way to bring people's posts together in any structural way. It seems like the discussion board technology could use a refresh and a boost. I do have one more question. I'm wondering on the heavy reliance on English text. There's a lot of talk about OCL being open and accessible to such a wide group of people, but here's a statisic from the Clear Language Group: Knowing the reading level of your text can give you a general idea how many people may be able to read it. The most recent national assessment of adult literacy showed that 43% of adults living in the U.S., some 93 million people, have Basic or Below Basic literacy skills. -retrieved from http://www.clearlanguagegroup.com/readability/ on July 2nd, 2019 I feel like this heavy reliance on English text is another aspect of what makes this kind of learning pretty advanced. It's definitely not for everyone, especially if almost half the adults in this country have only basic or below basic reading skills. It doesn't seem to me that this kind of learning is REQUIRED to be done through writing. It describes this kind of learning, yes, because that's what most people do. But couldn't there be a more inclusive way?
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