J.+Weekly+reflections

This section contains reflections on a variety of materials. The scope of this section includes reflection on, course material, postings to discussion of forums, personal progress through the course. The reflection is intended to remain true to my Teaching Philosophy in exploring the satisfaction with the learning journey.

**Week one:** Initially, I commenced a blog as this tool has commonly become accepted as an assessment activity. Again as a novice technologist and in keeping with my guinea pig status, I decided to commence a blog. This was a total disaster! Again like many of my time poor students, I found it exceptionally difficult trying to learn the technologies as well is keep up with the course content while simultaneously balancing the obligations as a lecturer…. Added to this this would concept of work-life balance simply equated to the need to move to a more time efficient and sanity saving method. The reverted to taking scribbled notes which are later transcribed. In embracing technology, albeit in the interests of speeding up the process of marking writing critiquing I have effectively trained my Dragon- a frequently utilise Dragon NaturallySpeaking to convert spoken word to text.

With great enthusiasm consult the course profile and correlated the assessment timetables obligations lecturer. As many students will attest life becomes hectic when multiple assignments and you are once. While this certainly is not the case with this course, when meeting course requirements as well as work requirements as does pose some issues with exceptionally high workloads. Wariness of the Ph.D. fit into the schedule? For now it remains to be considered as a work in progress work in progress- definitive date of completion life after next. My interest in undertaking this particular unit as part of the graduate certificate, pertains to work in converting traditionally face-to-face courses to online modalities. The need for students to embrace and incorporate technology with online courses cannot be over emphasised. There is frequently an assumption that students are already familiar with technology. As a lecturer and I am familiar with the basic technologies and now having completed a previous unit that focuses on the use of technology, I have been able to incorporate this with in my teaching learning and assessment.
 * Week two:** Learning journey


 * Week three:** Aftermath of **an e-attack**. To fully appreciate the position of these students, my decision was to offer myself as the proverbial guinea pig and attempt to utilise technologies such as the Wiki in order to present this assignment. I was already having doubt as to the efficiency in which I could address this assessment component using a wiki.On en early monring venture to my wiki site to add more detail i opended my wiki to find a malicious Wiki marauder had sabotaged my first Wiki effort. At that moment I was ready to toss the entire experiment in and revert to a nice simple word document format….. However, where is the challenge in that? This certainly promises to be an experience of the bitterest form…….


 * Week four:** I am in the midst of assisting students who are located over a vast geographical area to facilitate their group interactions for the purpose of creating a collaborative assignment. Required is a 3000 word case study. There is a clear structure provided so students (all first years and first effort at an assignment at university) so basically all they are required to do is flesh out the skeleton of the essay plan that has been provided by writing their information into paragraph format and incorporating links to supporting literature. Added to their difficulties- this is a **group work venture**. Students have had three weeks to “meet their peers" through the online forum and some are fortunate enough to live in the same locality or be undertaking a clinical placement. The main tools provided are closed forums for each of the groups within the Moodle page. Others hat adopted the wiki while a great volume of email traffic appears to be in existence. Essentially, this assignment is in contrast to the traditional submission option where after working within a group each student then submits an individual assignment. In this instance the group members create one document and each member of the group received the same mark. Groups are not allocated by the lecturer so some engagement on the forum is initially required. The goal is to have the student become familiar with the forum in the first instance, self- introduce and then form groups (of up to six students).

**Week five:** In week five of our course term, there has been a drop-off in the number of students participating in the discussion forums. It was highlighted in week one that participation in the forums was not compulsory and there were no marks attached. Initially students utilise the forum to make social contact with their peers and this was the objective to allows the social contact between students and from students with their lecturer. The general discussion forum essentially it was a facilitation of engagement and it can be seen that this purpose was met. In light of the approaching assessment, which focused on group work, students utilise this general discussion forum to make offers or invite people to join groups they were forming. This process appeared to work well. The students were reminded that the lecturer would not be assigning students to groups. Why was this the case? It was hoped that because students could self-select groups or groups would be more functional than students who are simply imposed upon to connect with other students.


 * Week six:** The readings encountered throughout the GCTE has made me question the fairness in allocating marks for a group assignment across all group members involved. I am greatly motivated by the need to enhance the student satisfaction of the learning journey in keeping with my teaching philosophy. From experience in running this course, the feedback given in forums after the assessment item has been marked indicates that students believe some group members coasted through with minimal input some were not even involved at all. It is of interest, that the students, when asked at two and again at four weeks into their group work project how well their group was functioning- reported by completing the survey that their groups or functioning well. When asked to complete a survey attached to the assignment as to how they required the group Mark to be split amongst the members, the majority of students replied that each member should equally share the mark. The informal discussions that occurred by way of the forum e-mails and phone calls to other students and which ultimately came to my desk reported that the student should have received a zero because it made zero contribution this student should receive 70% of the mark because they did 70% of the work…. Why is it then a formal situation that students will not identify non-functioning groups or poorly functioning groups….. And why and when asked in a formal setting do they all want the mark distributed equally amongst all group members?

These authors further explored a system that might be more equitable industry bidding marks based on peer assessment they mention tool called self and appear assessment resource kit (SPARK) and the inclusion of what they refer to as an “adjustment factor” which takes into account the self and peer assessment factor (SPA). On obtaining a working copy of this tool and experimenting, I can see why it is not frequently utilised. One issue that I see with this tool is that it is too complex and too time-consuming firstly to for the lecturer to learn and secondly to employ. Whilst the value of the tool is apparent and I see that it would work well with small class sizes. It should be highlighted that in some of my courses there are approx. 400 students. Unless this too,l by some method ,could be incorporated into the Moodle assessment calculations would be far too time-consuming to utilise. Added to this, it would require further resources being diverted to educate the students on how to utilise the system. Reference: Thompson D & Mc Gregor I 2005, “Self and peer assessment for group work in large classes” Making a Difference : 2005 Evaluations and Assessment Conference.
 * Week seven:** Having embarked on further searching for fairer and more equitable ways to distribute group March within a group I find I am alone in this quandary. An article entitled itself in pure assessments of group work in large classes by Thompson & Mc Greggor (2005), reflect many of the issues with which I have been faced. These and these authors mentioned issues of decree student satisfaction regarding group work in general and they see the fundamental problem of all group members receiving the same Mark regardless of the input from the individual student. A gain in keeping with my experience these authors also mention that peer assessment phase of group work and state that frequently the group shares in equal portions the mark amongst each member this is and I quote “regardless of the level and quality of individual contribution”. The authors note the experience where students still elected to have the same Mark for all group members when it was obvious to the lecturer that some students were not engage not contributing equally.

**Week eight** Workload is becoming increasingly difficult to manage at this point. The main obstacle is in writing the material and then uploading it to the e-portfolio. My uploading ceased but I still kep writing. This week i attempted to use some wmv technology however the files were too large to upload to this site so i shall investigate alternate methods of achieveing this. Much time has been invested in exploring the technology with little uploaded contributions to this site in the past few weeks. Additionally, this week I have become involved in a research project that looks at how students use technology. Again in keeping with my initial goal of being the human guinea pig to experience the student journey in being required to use technology I have enrolled as a student participant. So again, I am met with the frustration of learning new technology. I now am the proud host of all things –“ï”. I have an i-pad, and I-pod and i-phone and have come to the conclusion that i–am in i-technology overload! Most frequently experiencing the ID- 10 - T error. I watch in amazement as a ten year old instructs me in navigating the i-tune application store. Mind you I now have six cow related games loaded to the i-thingy- however, the instructional goal was achieved. And i-thought all this i-technology would make life easier. I- was mistaken! i-am struggleing to even see the small print on the screen at times. This week can be summed up as time out to learn the new technology.

News flash! - I am embarking on M-learning (mobile learning with mobile technology as a key feture) without even realising it. Mobile technology. A colleague forwarded to me a very interesting scholarly contribution on M-learning practice through the lens of the student and the lens of peers.

Reference:
McCombs, S 2010, 'Mobile Learning: An Analysis of Student Preferences and Perceptions Surrounding Podcasting', //Proquest LLC//, ERIC, EBSCO//host.//

**Week nine** Recently I was involved with a working party to provide enhancement for course development. The working group developed a number of strategies to enhance the effectiveness of group work and I will share their top ten strategies from the initial brainstorming session:


 * Communicate to students the benefits of working in groups and provide examples
 * Be clear in respect of want students are expect to achieve when working in groups and its alignment to learning outcomes
 * Employ enhanced technology that permits instantaneous, synchronous communication within the group
 * Employ self selection of groups where appropriate
 * Challenge stereotypes that define students’ technological literacy on the basis of age
 * Incorporate accountability in group work tasks to encourage students to perform
 * Include contracts as an assessment task that aims to identify the contribution that each student commits to make to the group
 * Include in the course profile rules and expectations for group behaviour; produce guidelines specific to each course that include a series of ‘what ifs’, e.g. What if someone drops outs? What if someone is not contributing?
 * Consider whether learning outcomes can be achieved by the use of group work preceding submission of individual tasks
 * Encourage the development of skills within the course and other courses (e.g. Professional Communication) to ensure students can manage group processes effectively

**Week 10** **Week 11** And so… as all good things must end…. I find myself rejoicing in the completion of my wiki based assignment... this human guinea pig has survived the past eleven weeks (and gained about 10 pounds as I sit munching before my lap top). I can now Skype on the move with the i-pod touch, view Moodle docs on while in transit with the i-pad not to mention the old faithful tools of email, telephone and a hardcopy book. Have I learnt much? … yes and more so… not just the content but also the experience has honed empathy for students who are confronted by the need to immerse their studies with technology. Where to from here…. Well my colleagues have already timetabled sessions for me to assist them tame their dragons (speech recognition programme of which I still echo the virtues ….). //“ [|__In the end we are all separate: our stories, no matter how similar, come to a fork and diverge. We are drawn to each other because of our similarities, but it is our differences we must learn to respect.__] ” //