Refelction of the 3

Quickly scanned the 3 papers mentioned in the course notes and this led me to thinking about the discussions we had on Saturday regarding monologue v. dialogue.

Yacci (2000) in his paper wrote that interactivity from a student's point of view is not interactive if their response to a teachers request is then not answered by the teacher. This then must surely be the case with a blog.  If you are the author of a blog and you are asking for a response to a question and, if this question then gets the repsonse you asked for, surely to complete the interactive loop you should respond to all replies and if it is your intention to have a blog that can maintain focus and foster deep, critical thinking (as mentioned in the previous post) then some of the Content Learning Patterns (listed below) that Yacci refers to should be crucial when the author of the blog is reponding to comments to posts.

Structural Knowledge Pattern ("why do you think like that?")

Extra-Instructural Pattern ("tell me more")

Activity in the Environmental Pattern ("does this do anything?")

Do you agree? Am I making sense?

In their paper Muirhead and Juwah (2004) write about research that was undertaken at a university in Australia.  The research was based on an online class and aimed to measure both teacher and student perceptions of six given categories, one of which was interactivity. The research revealed that interactivity was below expectations. Hopefully, seven years later this university understands what makes for good interactivity. If not, then Sabry and Barker (2009) seem to have it nailed. They write that using an interactive learning program can boost the speed and level of students’ learning and helps to improve students’ confidence and motivation. That said, I am going back to the year 13 BTEC blog I spoke about in the previous post to re-jig, re-analyse and revitalise it and hopefully put more dialogue than monologue into it.