Michael Fortune's e-Learning Blog and e-Portfolio

This week has been one of intense, hard work to build my course activities. [What do I know now that I did not know before?] Now that I have completed as much as I did in my course  and in the other course activities I feel I can say I learned new points of view.  These different perspectives from my own have arrived through the course activities and through engaging in discussion with my fellow classmates and Professor Pickett. I’ve recognized that I’ve learned new concepts because of my still-hovering, lack of self-confidence in my abilities to engage in critical inquiry with my fellow classmates and the professor in areas that were broadened by the large amount of prior knowledge based understanding others here show.   Moving away from that now, Professor Pickett’s presentation on creating a teacher presence and class community stimulated me to consider how to implement this in my own course and to better assimilate to online teach as well.  The adaptation of Chickering and Gamson’s 7 principles of good practice in online teaching and learning can be seen as the principles of good f2f teaching as well but they are indicative of the needs of on-line learning, which is the need to bridge the cueing system gap that is created from not having f2f social presence.  Moreover, several of these seven these practices are probably not considered much in the undergraduate f2f level.  This is only based on my speculation as I have no experience teaching higher ed but have been a student in higher ed. From my point of view, these 7 practices are mirrors of best practices for elementary school students; which I do have experience teaching.  For example, “encouraging student -faculty contact and interaction and student cooperation and reciprocity” are necessary in K-6. The teacher creates a bond between themselves and student in ES.  That bond creates trust on the part of the child that their teacher is giving them experiences that they need as a person.  That is created through respect and that respect must given among the students’ classmates to build a class community where children can learn to their fullest capabilities.  On the other hand, I can think of many college courses I sat in where the professor did not encourage “faculty contact and interaction.” I know some of them never learned my name – hardly faculty encouraged interaction.  Also, I’m sure they did not consider student cooperation and reciprocity. I was just sitting at a desk and didn’t “need to cooperate.” I needed to just sit there and not talk, take notes and get good grades.  Was I past the “need” to cooperate?  As Professor Pickett suggests, to create a meaningful learning experience for an on-line student (now I will stop making that distinction; I will refer to on-line students as “students” online or off-line.)   The need to cooperate as a student has not left , but it must be encouraged by the on line instructor to create more “valuable” learning.

At this point, I must touch on what I have learned from my fellow classmates as we discussed the material we were presented and used our personal insight to illustrate points.  In one of our discussion questions we were asked, who we are as educators.  Our blog guiding questions also include considering who we are as learners but, I will stick, right now, with who I am as a teacher.  As a teacher my experience has been in the f2f classroom. As a band teacher I have been somewhat sheltered from the need to make aware to my students that they are involved in things like meta- cognition reflecting as they are in my class.  Music learning is very task oriented. Do this-then that and you can move on to the next thing to do for next week.  Francisca had shared with me her disappointment of how she quit the piano as a young person and that, while she loved to play, she was not inspired enough by what she was learning.  This has somewhat to do with an imperfection in the method of teaching music. We teach music as if we teach sports. In sports are we to reflect on what we are doing?  NO!  “Just Do It!”, said the Nike ad.  The “doing” in music is performing, an act similar to participating in a competitive sport.  In the academic classroom the act of doing is the student’s learning, the process that is going on in their minds.  In this process there is no finish line and there are no “double bar lines” or “Fine.”  It is a process that can be refined however much possible during it’s act.

I’ve seen that by engaging students in this “academic classroom” (for lack of a better word) act will be the very key to sustaining  a level of student-material interaction that will get it past the “fact based” presentation of most music survey courses.   In my course students will relate the Grateful Dead to American history, culture, philosophy, other music and their own musical experience and not just learn facts and repeat them back to me. [How are you applying what you have learned to your own course?]  I have applied this all by creating a course whose interaction between students accounts for 90% of the course design.  I have created discussion questions that are of such great relation to the material that all told, I have 222 discussion questions.  The participation in these discussions accounts for half of the overall points in the course.

This is a course on the Grateful Dead, after all.  They created music whose main function was for dancing. The fact that their “dance” music was of such rich performance method and with such historical and metaphorically informed lyrics was not their only projected emphasis.  Those who enjoy the Grateful Dead have the luck of enjoying music that  has been so well documented and reviewed (they played almost 2,318 concerts in their time and all are available for listening in more than one form ( there are 7680 concert recordings of them available to stream on archive.org).  There’s a lot to enjoy but there’s a lot that can be learned from it.  Therefore I am presenting myself as not the “sage on the stage” but as close to who I am as a person so they will see that this is a course for “anyone”.  By using Voicethread and the icebreaking activities, and telling them of my own experience this will draw them in closer, intellectually.  Then, comes the content.  The content will soon by uploaded to the server as pdfs.  For now, if you look at my course you can see my discussion questions for each activity.  The discussion questions do not contain the answer in the reading. You will not find a certain answer on page 254 for example.   The questions take inquires within the reading and broaden their scope to include the student and his/her perspective.  A deep factual knowledge of the Grateful Dead is not necessary.  Their music is so threaded to reality, it is very “true”. It is also a celebration of death, not in the morbid, horror-show Hollywood but an affirmation of how death is a part of life and the two concepts are related.

Past my voicethread introduction, there will be little interaction between me and the students. The discussion and projects will be student supported.  I’m hoping it will stay that way. I have not taught this course so I may end up more involved than I assume in interacting with students.  I appreciate how Bill Pelz’ course featured mostly student led discussions.  I am looking for a way to include student lead discussions. I’m hoping Professor Pickett’s feedback will include some ideas on how to incorporate student led discussion in my 222 personally created discussion  questions.

Who I am as an educator has been changed from my on-line course experience and through my classmate discussions. I had previously been able to stay in the “bubble” of music teachers, we stick to each other.  Now I am learning from my 687 classmates how they consider engaging students through online learning. It’s forced me to get out of my comfort area of relating to other music teachers and challenged me to consider music and my teaching of it as it related to other disciplines transposed to the on-line learning environment.

During the process of creating my online course, the creating of discussion questions have brought the biggest challenges.  The over riding fear has been if these questions are good enough.  Before entering them into moodle, I’ve had to consider, “does this question stimulate thought?”  Then, does the thought it stimulates relate the Grateful Dead to other concepts meaningfully?   I found some articles yielded critical information but not many questions.  I scraped some reading s and substituted them for others.  I dropped my 8^th module and coordinated the final activity to be part of module 7. I’ve taken Professor Pickett’s advice to let my group activities be optional in terms of presentation. I’ve also taken Professor Pickett’s advice to make what was my “final” project one that allows for more options for presentation to let the student create in any way they feel more successful, instead of just performing a song.  Students can still perform a song of the Grateful Dead, but it must reflect what they have learned through the course; much more insight than your typical Grateful Dead cover band.

Having been present in the creation of my learning activities has shown me that I can still further create greater teacher presence. I’ve included the student need for teaching presence in my discussion rubric but need to further create ways to be part of their learning.  This might be just sitting on the sidelines and observing until I feel the need to re-set the climate for learning if it’s off track.

By doing these activities I have become even more challenged and feel even more uncomfortable.  Now I am dipping my other foot in to the online course world.  I am inserting my knowledge to this new forum.  It’s as if I’m putting my quarter in and watching the wheels turn until they stop on something. What will that something be?  I must have felt that I was in some kind of comfort zone. Then I was understanding and proving myself valuable to the other student’s learning. Also, I was shown how less of a digital native I am by doing the merlot activity.  I found a fantastic resource on it that I’ll use in my course.  How ever took a great deal of effort to be able to annotate my resource in the ways provided by diigo.  In fact, the screen they show in the tutorial we’ve visited was quite shocking.  The diigo toolbars and applications look “NOTHING” like the one my own system desktop.  It was very hard to take.   I have competed the MERLOT assignment to the best of my abilities but have to let go of it and stop obsessing on it.   I can’t do anymore than I have.  Or can I?  That is what creates the more discomfort! That is what  as a student in this course and course creator I am thinking about- “I must dig deeper.” (3)