Entrepreneurial Enterprises
What steps might one take to teach digital skills and entrepreneurship within a distance education environment? Be specific about which page or pages in chapter three that you are basing your thinking on. Use the Comments link for your contributions.
Keep in the back of your mind the thought that the distance education environment might be also becoming a metaphor for functioning as a business in cyberspace.
Team Building - Part II
Use the blog site that you created in our last class meeting. Create a blog posting that works out a basic lesson plan for converting another team building activities into a distance education activity using WebCT. Be creative.
Later your classmates will be asked to use the Comment link to give you some feedback.
When you have carried out this work at your own blog site, return to this third blog posting, and use the Comment link to add a terse summary of which team building topic you addressed, and include the web address of your blog site. It would be a good idea to also send an email to your classmates indicating which team building topic you have chosen for this as I don't want you to duplicate each others work.
Socializing in Distance Education
REAL's second chapter on Process Skills and Team Building Activites address one of the major concerns of distance education, building classroom community. It is not easy in a face-to-face environment to help a diverse population of students see that they are all in it together, that team spirit not only helps but is important to the learning process. Look through the 18 examples. Each of you will work with two of them, converting the experiences into activities that could take place solely in cyberspace.
Note that what is important to the learning process, is important to the social and conversational skills needed for operating as an effective team in a business. As David Winderberger noted in the
Cluetrain Manifesto, dialog is also important in a much deeper and more powerful way. Markets
are conversations. The Web did not make this true, but in making it clear and vastly easier, this feature is transforming the world.
For the first one, use the comments link to this posting to explain how you would use WebCT to carry out one of the team building activities in a distance education setting.
Post a comment as soon as possible about which one you are working on so that others do not grab the same one. You may not do one that someone else is working on. It would also be effective to send all in the course an email indicating which one you have taken.
A second posting will address what to do with a second team building activity.
Digital to REAL
Digital culture has clarified and better articulated information sharing and communication, composition, calculation, publishing and more. This has provided numerous opportunities for creativity and inventiveness that are being applied in nearly every field. Mixed with the global networks of cyberspace, it is has transformed and rewired many business, corporations and their practices. There is little that is just virtual about its effects for it has contributed mightily to the movement of factories and other places of employment, erasing careers and creating new ones. The impact of these rapid changes has been gut wrenching for many people and communities. Digital cultures one significant failure is that it has not clearly articulated how to create jobs, businesses, places of employment and the wealth or income to survive and thrive within this digital environment. Where is that software program or set on online processes? Even more striking is the almost covert nature of this economic knowledge within public school and university curriculum. For a capitalist democracy, this hidden agenda seems most peculiar. This blog site considers how one might go about fixing this.
How does one build the curriculum to move the digital culture towards better support for the entrepreneurship that can deal with this?
