Some people trying to understand how all this happens but do not manage to follow as they expect,  feel they are not included.

Lynne’s “breathing-in-and-breathing-out-in-foc” title for this post is a metaphor for calming down when  in distress and also describes what you do at childbirth to alleviate the pain. She is overwhelmed by the experience, feeling out of breath and at loss by not being able to follow. “I am getting that left out feeling that I recall so well from grade school when being the last one picked to play on the soft ball team… But Debs’ comment on being overwhelmed too and Illya encouragement gave me my feet back and reminded me to breathe.”  Like in support groups, finding out and meeting other people who struggle or have faced the same problem, sharing and lending a hand helps those involved to overcome or move “beyond” their condition/experience.

Sarah muses over and reflects on the process and architecture of a blog workshop she gave and what she imagines the best sequence might be: “The week before, we talked a lot more about concepts and I don’t know if that was quite as interesting for participants - they were still focusing on the blog technology. I am wondering now if we would have been better off concentrating on setting up the blogs in the first two weeks, and then in the third week looking at commenting and following blogs in a reader.”

People learn differently through different means and feel stimulated through different environments.

Nellie, for instance, is more attuned to the synchronous moment and is very active urging people to experiment and attend the conferences she organizes on different platforms.

Others, like Dolores in this post, may prefer to ground their experience in theory.

Illya may express some of her concepts through pictures or finding points she connects to in other posts, Greg has been actively representing his thoughts through graphics, while Andrew has started a concept map “to make better sense of the learnscape”.

Some, when taken out of their comfort zone, question the validity of the whole concept.

Trish “what is this for…? I am just contributing to millions of other egos that bumble spewed thought into an endless virtual world? Does publishing this ‘out there’ define me, leave my mark?”

I’d say it does…I see it as the beginning of our social and cognitive presence online, a way we can relate to what and who surround us in this new environment.

Russ wonders how this diffuse, fuzzy learning can occur. “What is learning anyway? Is it that I learned a certain amount of content or is it that I grew in my understanding, knowledge and social skills related to a field of knowledge that actually networks with people’s attitudes, knowledge and actions?”

Kay looks back, incorporates the Zen spirit and let’s it flow. She starts understanding that learning should not be a battle to control time, processes, content or people or respond to assumptions or fit roles. “I am no longer worrying about currently being a lurker … postings are being read and considered. I am reflecting and trying to let go of starting with the end in mind, realizing that it’s OK to not know where my learning will lead, relax and enjoy the journey.”

So I ask - have we ever listened to or read about our own learners’ experience about learning? Do we manage to read behind the lines, check the stories and metaphors used? Have we been able to visualize and map how they are going about their learning so as to help them get better in the process?  Can we relate and feel their angst when they understand what to do but can’t figure out how to do it best? Do we let them be and become or do we impose our ways and views of learning?

I started posting first in the email forum, which is easier and a more immediate way of establishing contact than a blog. The curious being in me lurked for some time, trying to get the gist of the flow, observe people’s moves and interventions:  some making contributions, others asking for help and some directing the conversation. I read the reactions/approaches and , malgré moi (something I still need to control), flamed (reacted to some too strongly). I have finally started posting and will try, from now onwards to link, thread, weave in and discuss the various posts or comment on the blogs.

Note on the side: for the coders out there, it would be wonderful if someone would come up with a widget or plugin which would automatically send all the posts we make in other forums to our blogs (like twitter does). This would bring together all the data we have dispersed around the web into our own portfolio.

I also went over some material I had stored and contributed to the course wiki in the extra readings area. This recording of a presentation made by James Farmer to the 2005 EVO Session on weblogging took me some time to convert into an ogg file but is worth listening to. I hope I can recover the slides - I must have them in some back-up file in my old computer. Anyway, James talks about facilitating a community of inquiry using blogs and message boards, the topic of this week - I am a bit behind in some areas and advanced in others :-)  If you are more visual that aural and have some time for reading, then you can also have a go at in more detail in his paper.

As I joined late, I had a certain difficulty in finding who the other people from the course were for there was  little interaction with them in the first phase. There is an introduction thread in the discussion area of the wiki but this, from what I gather,  served mostly for people to connect to Leigh (cannot access it from outside) so he could add participants to the Google group list. Although I could catch up with what was going on through posts to the google groups and read blogs that quickly summed up events and synthetized reactions (threading conversations and summing up what is happening in a distributed and horizontal environment helps a lot)

I missed the interaction or socialization phase (phatic talk) before people starting posting on the message boards and their own blogs.

Last year when moderating Social Media in ELT,  we invited Charles Cameron to animate the opening and ending of the session with games. It’s a fun ice-breaker and forces people in a certain way to find out about new participants in other ways than just the common interest of the course.  Self-disclosure and conversations, like Jeffrey Keefer experienced (even though it was a one to one Skype conversation),   remove the distance, build more trust, develop trust and establish an online identity and help us remember each other in a different way.  It also avoids the flood of standard introduction type emails or grouping ( chums only) in separate forums that characterize this phase. It is a difficult task to meet, place the name and connect to new people.  This is why I also enjoy other visual clues, like a photograph or avatar I can relate to and tend to be suspicious of people who do not provide details about their context or whereabouts. I feel it is important to establish not only a cognitive presence but also a social one.

I have now aggregated most blogs (please check if I have missed yours) in Gregarius but again find it difficult to follow who is posting what. First, because many people have used the same title for their blogs so it is difficult to distinguish one from the other and second,  because the person’s name does not appear together with the posts. (still playing with tool so there may be a plugin or something which can help me do that) . Another way of remembering people’s names would be for them to add to their signatures their blog address in the Google Groups - this would make it easier to relate name to blog and facilitate connections.

Next post probably end of the afternoon - rushing to the dentist.

As I had not first planned to participate and joined late, the beginning was chaotic. Fortunately the course allows for plenty of time for people to digest the concepts and react .  I was enjoying the freedom of my sabbatical year to go to conferences, museums, exhibitions and get together with people from different walks of life and professional areas. More and more, I have been trying to engage with non-homogeneous groups of people. After having spent 35 years enclosed inside a classroom, interacting with the same crowd and doing the same things, I have an imperious urge to know what is happening out there and learning from the world around me.

Acknowledging and interacting with this diversity of cultural, linguistic and professional personal backgrounds, assumptions and motivations is IMHO a key competency not only f2f  but even more so when one is online, where physical cues are almost nonexistent.

Leigh says:

facilitation is a rare and valuable skill to have. It is a service that is often used in conferences, debates, panels and tutorials, or simply where groups of people are meeting and need someone to help negotiate meaning and understanding, and to keep everyone engaged and on task.

* Good facilitation depends on good communication skills.

* Good online facilitation depends on good online communication skills.

* Facilitating online communities… what does that involve?

Courses like this one, however, rely mostly on written text, so the language used / the educational perspective and jargon may be an important barrier for expression of those from a non-Anglo-Saxon culture, non- academic background or different literacy practices.

Non-native speakers have the double trouble of negotiating meaning  and weaving their tacit knowledge of another background with the explicit learning of the technical knowledge and skills about the nature and practice of the particular skill or competency being acquired in a language different from their own - English (Beyond Communities of Practice - Language, Power and Social Context”, Cambridge University Press, 2005, page 151).

I am in ELT (secondary school) but, in spite of all my practice and exposure on the web, I am finding increasing difficulty in communicating my thoughts in different contexts where a particular language/jargon is used (same for the other languages I speak - French , Polish and Portuguese) if I am not constantly exposed to them and do not practice it. I am permanently chasing for the different meanings of words and collocations so as to negotiate their impact and try not sound inarticulate or inappropriate. Also, are the online facilitation skills that come from an Anglo-Saxon culture the same for the French, Brazilian, Polish, Spanish cultures or do we accept them as being so because they have not been developed in our online contexts?

I am a self-directed learner -most of what I know comes from observing, experiencing and putting myself in situations where the skills I wish to acquire are required. I also test my possibilities, watch for reactions and try to learn from my mistakes. So although I have already facilitated/moderated/taught online courses and belong to different online communities this time, I decided I would record the process from an intercultural angle.

Next topic: First Steps