I had to leave the thought-grazers at 12:35 to see at student up at the Heath… But, following a slightly disappointing event we had both attended, where learning seemed to be very much ‘assumed’, I was glad to discuss with Joe about shared thinking in collaboration and being able to accredit that. He, David and I were thinking about the idea of whether it is possible to identify networked learning activity, what does it look like, and if it is possible to then accredit that (link to my own blog post about it (again!)).
It seems contradictory to give individuals an individualised grade for a shared idea that emerged as part of a collaborative conversation. Joe was saying that it would be very useful for the students to explain how they came to the ideas they eventually decided to explicate. As much as we might disdain the idea, able students want a good classification. If their individual conversational ‘moves’ could be reified (i.e. shared online), perhaps this is where epistemic fluency (after Ohlsson 1995 – see below – as referenced in the 2001 Networked Learning Guidelines) comes in in terms of being able to classify a contribution – we could ask the question, does this qualify as epistemically valid contribution? Is it using an epistemic ‘move’?
Apparently Dr Kelly Page is getting a whole module acredited through the contribution to the wiki although I would need her to explain more fully. It is as David said, something about getting students to the process rather than the end product although ironically some things about ‘final’ exams had that effect… But we’re in the game of trying to keep students…. Jonathan Scott was saying he’d bumped into another Kelly who’d just been able to accredit her module as totally student lead and taught, that’s one way to engage students… although, apart from the students own opinions, I’m not sure what the NMC would make of that…
Describing | Writing about an object or event so that your reader acquires an accurate idea of that object or event. |
Explaining | Writing about an event or pattern of events so that your reader understands why that event or pattern of events happened. |
Predicting | Writing so that your reader becomes convinced that the event in question will happen. |
Arguing | To give reasons for (or against) a particular position, thereby increasing (or decreasing) your reader’s confidence that the position is right. |
Critiquing | Highlighting the good and bad points of something. |
Explicating | Writing so that your reader acquires a clearer understanding of something. |
Defining | To define a term is to propose how it should be used. |
Ohlsson S. (1995) Learning to do and learning to understand: a lesson and a challenge for cognitive modelling. In Learning in Humans and Machines: Towards An Interdisciplinary Learning Science (eds P.Reimann & H.Spada), pp. 37—62. Pergamon, London.