Thursday, 29 October 2009

Modelling Knowledge Acquisition (aka Blackboard vs Twitter)

I've got an idea brewing I'd really welcome some comments on.

I want to find an audience participation model to
a) make my conference presentation more memorable (sorry - vanity)
but
b) help people experience the differences between the way students acquire knowledge when using Blackboard and when using a social networking model (think twitter or facebook). Then what I want to show is a future vision showing how my finding the 'best of both worlds' (adding a little control to the openness) we can achieve something really useful for Higher Education.

At present I'm imagining representing units of knowledge as wristbands.

In the Blackbaord model the tutor basically hands them out to the students one at a time when they come down the paths (folder/structure) to get them.

In the twitter model, everyone has wristbands, and they're all chucking them into the mix and retreiving them, although of course they can't tell which ones the tutor provided very easily...

Then in the future vision, perhaps we colour code the bands, to represent the tutors contributions. Or ideally, we let the tutor sit in the middle of the throwing and sort the received bands - applying some moderation/structure to the collaborative stuff going on.

I don't want to get too deep into connectivism/constructivism learning theory here, although happy to touch on it. I really want to demonstrate the richness/mess of the social model and the clarity/restrictiveness of Blackboard.

Any thoughts? If the paper is accepted, I'll be delivering this at the Durham Blackboard conference in January - so need to order enough wristbands in whatever colours I decide before then.

1 comments:

Frightful Bish said...

Have you thought of using sweets? They could represent "digestible" nuggets of knowledge which are consumed.

In your future vision, different colours could indicate "nutritional value" with the tutor's ones being "better for you". Potentially the tutor could even re-wrap contributed nuggets to give them a seal of approval.

One snag is that people can't easily pass on a nugget once they've consumed it (let's not go there).

People still like getting sweets, provided basic hygiene and allergy rules are observed, and best of all they're not just so much wasted plastic at the end of the day.

For what it's worth.

Robin