Module 3 (week 4): Thoughts on working as a group

Working as a group is:

1) frustrating, when you like things going at a particular pace. I therefore find myself organising people, because I want to take time off and would need the ball to get rolling now!

2) Do you just ignore those who don’t engage and get on with it with the people who are engaging? Yes!

‘strong community has a positive impact on educational outcomes and that strong community has a social element to it.’

‘Space refers to the role of the teacher in creating educational space, etiquette, tone, and the overall social fabric for the course, programme, and university experience. Aesthetics matter for the teaching and cognitive explorations that will follow. Discussion boards, Padlets, Teams, shared documents and so forth matter, as does tone, etiquette, and responsiveness.
Discourse refers to the capacity of the social presence to engage the cognitive presence through communication. The communication involved in discussing, writing, and otherwise engaging with the cognitive domains under investigation is predicated in no small part on the social presence already established in these spaces. How we write in this disciplinary space, how we draw on research and construct arguments, how we adopt the communicative practices at work in the field and in the profession, all of this is accelerated by a strong social presence.
Pedagogy is often mystically referred to as the ‘art of teaching’ but really is more precisely the practices of teaching and the theories of learning that underpin those practices. So how the teacher teaches, essentially.’