Reflecting on the experience of the OU LIVE tutorial and breakout room discussion and using the questions provided as a prompt … ( Permission has also been kindly given by all those involved to refer to comments etc )
What were your experiences and feelings during the session?
I enjoyed the whole experience of the OU Live Session in Week 3 with Janet, Adrian, Cathy and Gillian ( although we lost connection with Cathy at the beginning :() …. I’m not new to OU Live but I found that there were some functions that I hadn’t used before in OU Live. For example the ability to move between whiteboard views – reflecting on this I realise now that I have used the facility before to move between slides but hadn’t made the connection with the white board facility. Gillian took me through how to do this in (call it practical research for participation learning ! )and before I knew it I was zipping around between the whiteboards at speed.
Another thing I also hadn’t experienced before was the joy of feeling as if I had been teleported between the main and the break out room. I just couldn’t get visions out of my head of a little Debbie being picked up and whizzed through the ether before landing softly in the breakout room … like a sort of mix between Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Harry Potter …
Anyhow, we stayed quite a while longer than planned it was another great opportunity to meet with others and grapple with both the technology and the task that we had been set…
What did you learn about the Sfard paper itself? Were some parts of the session more useful than others in this respect?
I found some of Sfard’s writing quite difficult to get to grips with. I had to read it a couple of times and even though some of the ideas were sort of familiar, I still found that I needed to read it carefully. 
However, I found that miraculously as soon as Janet started her tutorial things started to make much more sense…. Was this because I had acquired some initial knowledge but by having it explained to me ( perhaps in a different way) that I was able to consolidate my knowledge through participation in the tutorial ?
I had a bit of a light bulb moment when we looked at the key concepts and the metaphorical mappings and Janet started to offer up examples and scenarios – this made the learning much more ‘real’ for me.
This was brought even more to life by the activities that we were asked to do which really helped me make sense of the terminology ( at least I think it did ! ) For me the whole idea of blurry (fuzzy) boundaries between acquisition and participation seem to get even more blurred the more I think about them …
I found both parts of the session useful – I liked the way Janet explained things and gave us a lovely warm welcome when we arrived. I also liked the breakout room discussion as we all worked really well together and I learnt a lot about the tech from actually doing it !
This sort of consolidates my previous view that I really do learn better by ‘doing’ and as I consider myself quite a visual learner I suppose using the clipart during the activities also appealed to my learning style.
In our breakout rooms we found that we talked a lot (mostly about Sfard ) but didn’t actually write all that much down – I think what could have helped here on reflection was either a role allocation of scribe ( perhaps turn taking) or even, if we had felt more confident with using alternative software packages we could have used those to capture ideas and then paste into the white board – I found that I thought I was typing away but it didn’t work a lot of the time ! I think Adrian and Gill experienced the same … anyhow although I don’t expect anyone can read it, here is what we came up with …
Can you come to any (perhaps tentative) views about the pros and cons of OU Live for the task you were set, in the context of a Masters module of this kind? Do you feel, for example, that this synchronous event carries more status when compared with online forums? (You’ll remember from Week 3a that Goodyear (2006) argues that this is the case.)
I think OU live is a great tool for collaborative learning. I find that just having the verbal conversation with people allows me to make a much more meaningful connection with them and for me, this helps me to form and build relationships with other students on the course. Reflecting on why this occurs is not so easy. Could it be that people start to seem more ‘ real’ and human – I wonder how this relates to Identity ?
I was reminded of my early days with the OU (..ahem back in the dark ages in the late 1990’s ! ) and the interactions that we had then between students. Those were initially face to face during (well spaced out) tutorials and then later when Online Conferencing was first introduced well that was like a whole other world going on – particularly because it just wasnt ‘ the norm’ to have an online presence so people in the real world just didn’t get it !
Although Online Conferencing that I used back then ( I think it was called First Class ?) helped with connecting to other students through forum discussions and chats etc I think OU live takes this to a different level in helping with feelings of isolation etc because of the verbal / visual capabilities – I also think it foster a real sense of community and these days it could be argued that because it is more common place for people to have an online presence through social media etc perhaps this feels more familiar ?
I would still recognise however that even though these days communicating online is much more commonplace it can still spark up feelings of anxiety for people who are new to using it and indeed having to take that first ‘ leap of faith’ can be quite a daunting experience.
How far, if at all, would OU Live or a similar tool be useful in your own context?
We use Blackboard Collaborate in work. I use it quite a lot for online collaborative activities etc and it works really well. We have also started using it for some of our online courses and I think this will grow.
How would you design the activities? If you are already using a tool of this kind, how do the activities you run compare with the session you have just completed?
Funnily enough I have just studied one of our courses where we have incorporated Collaborate to. Interestingly the design of the course doesn’t introduce Collaborate until over half way through the course . I found that a bit odd and have fed this back that for me having it earlier in the course would help to form a sense of community and start to develop the relationships that I refer to above. I also think having some kind of interactive session like the clip art exercise worked really well.
References
Sfard, A. (1998) ‘On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one’, Educational Researcher, vol.27, no.2, pp.4–13; also available online at http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/ login?url=http://www.jstor.org/ stable/ 1176193 (last accessed 18 November 2014).
Bayne, S. (2005) ‘Deceit, desire and control: the identities of learners and teachers in cyberspace’ in Land, R. and Bayne, S. (eds) Education in Cyberspace, Abingdon, RoutledgeFalmer.
Cox, R. (2006) Vicarious Learning and Case-based Teaching of Clinical Reasoning Skills (2004–2006), Swindon, ESRC.
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