Grounded Guidelines/Case Study: Education
Stated Purpose of the Conferencing
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The lecturer in charge of this particular module described it as "an incestuous course within the course" because of the way in which it made use of the medium of CMC to help students to engage with the potential of CMC in education. He seeks to "talk about CMC while doing it".
First of all, it's an incestuous course within the course; the whole MA is on IT in Education; this particular bit is on devising online courses within education, and therefore it is actually run as an online course. Within the MA as a whole we've sort of conceptualised the technological sides in the past as being what we've called hypermedia on the one hand, by which we mean resources one interacts with - CD ROMs, Web sites and so on in which it's the computer you are interacting with - modelling, where you are building systems, and the CMC, which is kind of organising the learning through discussion - collaborative discussion. So that's the kind of distinction from the other modules, and it is taught therefore using this technology simply because that is what it is talking about. It's just an appropriate method of teaching what we are talking about, and actually shows to the students the kind of advantages and disadvantages of that system through doing so. [Lecturer] |
Also the tasks have a structure through the tasks because again of what I am trying to do. I'm trying to talk about CMC while I am doing it. Roughly speaking, the first task will be a brainstorming activity of some kind. The purpose behind that being that it enables everybody to speak, and tries to reduce the criticism, and thence tries to reduce the fear of publication, which is one of the aspects I find that people have difficulty with - some people - some cultures. We have an international group of students locally, so to speak. [Lecturer] |
In general, the course intended to deploy technologies and approaches with its participant group which the participants might be expected to want to use with the student groups for which they themselves were responsible. For example, the longer duration of the course gave all of the students the opportunity to serve in the role of moderator of the electronic conferences which were a central part of the course.
There have been a lot of different sorts of things, and they have changed - because it is quite a long course; two terms - they tried to set up tasks with different sorts of ways of working. They also tried to make sure that everyone gets - that everyone has the experience of moderating within the group conference. [Student] |
