We’ve noticed that our students are getting lost!
Navigating the campus is easy. Things are usually the same, buildings don’t appear and disappear that often. Our rooms have numbers so it’s pretty easy to locate the room that has their science lesson in it. We also have bell times.
Bell+local knowledge+subject=class.
This is something that they are familiar with.
Conversely, teachers also know the meaning of a bell. They know that student can find them, they know that the student will write on paper and ultimately give it to them. When they get around to it, they mark it an give it back … sooner or later.
Project Based Learning however requires students to navigate the digital landscape that we are creating with Moodle and also for teachers to learn how to collect, read and respond to digital texts. This creates all sorts of chaos. Some students adapt easily and quickly learn how to get around. Some teachers have worked out that it actually takes less time, less effort to give better feedback in a more timely manner.
This means that a significant number of teachers and students get ‘lost’. The old structures no longer exist and it takes a group effort to get things back on the road.
There are a number of problems in delivering courseware – run by a bunch of teachers. One example : they all approach their idea of ‘what is a good project briefcase’ from different angles.
Some overload it, giving so many tips, tricks, hints and links that students are not at all sure if they need to respond to all of it or some of it. Students being students, they usually opt to do nothing. After about 108 minutes … the alarm goes off (the teacher finally gives an explicit demand) – and the students then all do as directed. This defeats the PBL ethos as learning has extreme peaks and troughs with periods of confusion in between.
Other teachers do the minimum. The bare bone documents are uploaded. This is like telling the student the lesson is in the afternoon and in the lower block. They waste time wandering around trying to find the right lesson at the right time. Students we assume, are getting ‘details’ in the classroom. But with no scaffold and timeline, it has to be assumed that this is highly interpretive on the part of the students. The teacher is making some real assumptions that the students are making forward progress
One danger of delivering Class2.0 is the management of student works. Yes, yes, I know, just get the RSS feed … but to the historically analogue teacher, they have no ability to read the map, so easily loose students in the metaverse. Room numbers should logically become ‘tags’ – so we can easily see not just what learning is occurring, but also where it is occurring. Blogging on multiple platforms with no unified, agreed school wide method of aggregation means that students get misplaced.
The most obvious way to unify the teacher and students is to use a calendar that they both understand.
If you produce a project timeline with phrases like ‘lesson 4, task 3′ – it’s too unfamiliar. Journal Entry 23, week 7 is equally unfamiliar.
What we are doing in documenting our courseware is developing a calendar using unfamiliar dates and texts.
By using a calendar (May 12th) we create a simple and familiar mechanism. Students 14/15 are not used to organising time and work. Of course it is a skill that we learn over time, but as soon as we shift from familiar ‘just in case’ learning to ‘just in time’ learning, this is a skill that needs to be taught. By using a calendar to plan, pace and present scaffolded tasks, we are meeting this learning need. In Moodle, create a simple calendar of events page. One entry, one task, one day at a time.
Rather than bloat the project briefcase with information ‘pick an mix’ style, having one calendar text – hyperlinking – to one other digital text (document/note/webpage etc) it is easier for students to follow a logical path. Day …. Task …. Value Add.
One of the key principles of ‘good web design’ I learned from Pat Seybold in the 90s (http://www.customers.com) that the user should NEVER be more than three clicks away from anywhere else. Creating a Moodle Courseware server that actually benefits PBL requires the managers and creator of it to have some experience and understanding of ‘information architecture’. Using a calendar as the central hub of what you and your students are doing will focus the delivery of PBL.
Problem solved? No, not really. Teachers need to extend themselves. Now they cannot simply upload some word document, but need to start considering how to add text to a calendar and hyperlink to another page or document (hard if you’ve never opened your mind to hypertext before).
You can’t just dump 20 documents in a briefcase and hope the students will figure out which to use in what order. Some documents/pages may be relevant to several tasks, some to one only task – in the case of Science for example, some information/tasks need to be explicit -as many scientific concepts are unavoidably explicit – discovery learning is not always achievable in the time frame of the project.
Using hypertext to scaffold learning is a skill that teachers must learn in Class2.0 if they want to be effective ‘leaders’ not ‘teachers’ in the traditional notion. I guess that is a big difference.
Becoming a ‘leader or learning’ and a classroom ‘facilitator’ means no seeing yourself as a ‘information kiosk’ – just a place for kids to come and get facts.
If you are not seen by students as someone who is skilled at ‘leading’ through the construction of digital texts, then it is quite possible that students will be unable to select the ‘better’ information you are aiming for – either from the bag of documents you’ve uploaded or by hitting Google or Wikipedia. They learn from this, so begins a battle for the ‘teacher’ to be seen as relevant to them.
I think students in PBL quickly factorise the adults in their classroom into two types.
Either a ‘fact giver’ – someone who gives a fact in response to a direct question, or a ’solution builder’ – someone who helps them apply what they are learning into some context though some visible artifact. “what is” verses “how can I”.
I hopeI’m the latter. I have no idea about the ‘facts’ involved in a ’social justice’ project. But I am not too bad at leading them in how to go about finding them and applying them to their solutions – creatively and authentically.
I like the ‘Lost’ analogy. When the plane hits the ocean, the passengers are sitting in rows and each has a clear role. Doctors, hairdressers, writers, housewifes, businessman etc., Just like a school who decides to SHIFT to become PBL advocates … they are thrust together to survive in a new hostile environment, they must work together to succeed, not just survive.
Some choose to lead and some are forced to lead by circumstance. Shifting a school culture and learning style from traditional/ICT to PBL/Class2.0 poses similar challenges – breaking down decades of authoritarianism and cultural capital – where teachers are truly ‘facilitating’ students learning styles and needs.
Perhaps the critics of PBL and Class2.0 should be considered to the ‘the others’?. But I’m getting lost now so I’l stop 
Thank you for writing this – just the ticket to point people to who are planning any kind of learning program with online components! Let’s set this text as a reading for new teachers in training to read – lest they fall into the trap of analog learning!