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.
posted by Bob Houghton @ 9:40 AM
1 Comments:
For the team building activity "The IX" Exercise I would use the Whiteboard and Chat Room features of WebCT. Prior to the group members beginning the activity, I would place a large IX on the Whiteboard using the text tool. The instructions would be for the group to decide how to turn the symbol into a 6 by using the freehand line tool to draw one single line. The students would use a recorded chat room to discuss the work as they made changes to the whiteboard. At the same time, each student can see the attempts made by their classmates on the whiteboard. Once they have completed the task, it will remain on the whiteboard for the teacher to retrieve.
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