While I was there… Treating collaborative thinking

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. 3762. Pergamon, London.

Oxygen as an enterprise alternative to Dropbox

My son has been VERY actively trying to persuade me to look into using Oxygen Cloud as an adjunct to Dropbox. Today he sent me this link which is worth taking a moment to read. There’s also a video to watch that explains/describes the model of file-sharing.

From this you can see that the main difference between Dropbox and Oxygen is the encryption which immediately addresses the recent “scares” about Dropbox releasing information to the US government upon request (of course you can still operate your own private encryption on Dropbox files if you want – but that’s a bit of a hastle).

So, Pete has allowed me to be one of his team members and so “family files” will be shared in the cloud using Oxygen. For any small team of five or less, why not use the free trial Oxygen service. If it meets your requirements, consider paying for secure storage in the cloud.