Teachers often talk about their classes as though they are an entity in their own right, complete with personality traits. “They are such a playful/hardworking/creative class.” In my experience, the group dynamic that emerges from the interactions and relationships among the individual students has a massive influence on everything that happens in the classroom, be it educational or social. I taught thirteen year old girls for most of my career as a teacher and amongst that demographic, the impact of group dynamics cannot be underestimated.
In a traditional classroom the members of a class are able to make personal connections easily through daily, face to face interaction. The proximity of being in the same physical space facilitates that process. VLEs provide an opportunity for group members to make personal connections without face to face interactions. From that perspective the VLE could be seen a ‘space’ to connect, but is it fruitful to conceptualise VLEs as a technical replacement of a traditional classroom environment? This approach to VLE design was challenged by Cousin in her article “Learning from Cyberspace”(Cousin 2005). She argued that in an attempt to soothe the “luddite yearning for the apparent safety of the past” higher education establishments whether consciously or not, have modelled VLEs on both the physical and organisational aspects of traditional educational structures. In doing so they are perhaps limiting experimentation and innovation that could occur when traditional structures and norms are set aside.
By focusing on the spatial metaphor of the IDEL class and trying to make sense of it in terms of our current frame of reference, are we limiting our imagining of the virtual class of the future?
Virtual learning environments restrict our ability to detect the social cues that subconsciously enable us to stereotype (as I discussed in a previous blog post “Discourse on Discord” ). VLEs, therefore, provide opportunities to interact differently with our fellow students than in a traditional classroom setting. It could be useful to understand how these different interactions impact on our ability to identify as a group and what, if any, effect that has on educational outcomes.
In mapping out the IDEL class, I chose to focus on the interactions that happen in the VLEs. I used padlet to do this because, of all the digital tools that I explored, padlet offered the most functionality to a user that was not prepared to upgrade. The app also allowed me to place a padlet within a padlet in order to drill down and explore certain areas in more depth.
Disclaimer:
The images that I used to represent the student and tutor personas in the class are lacking in diversity but their use allowed me to keep a smile on my face whilst I engaged in some serious thinking.
https://padlet.com/roof/nasxc3zzz3j3
Cousin, Glynis. 2005. “Learning from Cyberspace.” Education in Cyberspace, 117–29.
Good point on understanding a class as a person with its own character. The metaphor as a space for connections is a useful one and can be extended beyond person-to-person relations to relations between ‘things’/ learning materials/ people etc… which can be extended far outside the formal boundaries of the VLE classroom and the class. Occasionally, when class discussions extend in to Twitter, we would occasionally be joined by the authors of some of the literature we were examining which was really motivating for students and staff. The yearning for the past that Cousins cites is, of course, reinforced by the inertia of education systems, rick aversion, the breadth and depth of networks of normalisation and regulation that limits, or is perceived to limit, what teachers can do.
That’s a nice use of padlet with opportunities for expansion – in the different tutors for example, or the different experiences of Discord type chat verses audio. There’s also the course and the programme Twitter presences which will become more central to the course in a week or so.