Tag: webinar reflections

Week 7 – Learning communities

As usual, I could not attend the webinar since I had teaching then. Below I reflect on some questions raised in the webinar.

 

What are the key positives / negatives of online collaboration?

The best part is that I don’t need to travel. It feels so unnecessary to travel a lot to attend meetings: traveling takes a lot of time and it’s usually not environment friendly (especially if I need to fly somewhere). So working in online meetings work can work pretty fine – especially with Zoom which I really like.

Although I personally prefer online meetings to avoid long-distance traveling, I still participate in a project which makes f2f transnational meetings compulsory, so I travel then. Of course f2f meetings have also have their positive sides as the presence of other people, shared walks or meals add a unique layer to working together. Such experiences strengthen cohesion.

I think the best combination is when we meet our international / global partners f2f sometimes (for example at conferences) and work intensively online in-between such meetings.

 

What was your worst / best collaborative experience and why?

Usually I have good experiences since I am surrounded by great colleagues. However, I have also recognized some social loafing in one of the teams I work in, and it is very challenging to handle it, especially because the guy who systematically doesn’t do anything is otherwise a nice person and works a lot in other projects.

I think many times social loafing is a survival strategy in academia: people are forced to take part in as many projects as their boss can imagine (especially if they are not yet tenured so are in a pretty vulnerable position), but of course everybody is overloaded so people simply prioritize their n+1 tasks and if they find their 1000th part-time project less motivating, they just simply abandon it.

 

Do you collaborate or cooperate?

Both – it depends on the task and the situation. I understand that collaboration is something more than cooperation, you get involved much more in joint activities and collaboration is a much more complex structure in which partners are interdependent. Cool. However, not all tasks require such dedication. There are necessary but simple, boring and mechanistic tasks that you can perform with simple collaboration. Typically such task is for example the feeding of various administrative databases of the university. You add your stuff, don’t even look at anybody else’s stuff, and you all maintain a fabulous institutional machinery which, if everything goes well, pays you a salary.

 

What considerations do we need to take when collaborating online?

I’m part of several research teams and we work quite a lot online. We need to be super careful to be in line with GDPR. For example, if we want to discuss data which includes personal information, we can only use the secured channels our university provides to us. Several popular and otherwise well-working online collaborative platforms cannot even be considered.

Week 5 – Being / becoming open

Again, I could not attend the webinar so I share my reflections here, especially regarding the five dimensions of openness, and the risks of making something open without proper support.

So first my self-reflection in the light of the five dimensions:

  1. Sharing own content: I’m happy to share own content, e.g. tasks that I use in my teaching. I also quite often ask colleagues to share their ideas and good practices with me so I think it’s part of a mutually beneficial cooperation.
  2. Encouraging students to share: in my courses, most of assignments are open to the study group at least so students can read others’ posts and learn from them, but I also encourage students to share their work in their blog if they wish (I never make it compulsory, though). The only assignment which is by default cannot be open to the study group is the reflective learning diary which is the summary of one’s learning path in the course, and might include quite personal and sensitive issues. I at least mention to students that sharing some parts of their reflective diary with peers can be useful (as it can start conversation which gives birth to new ideas).
  3. Sharing research data: I’ve shared the anonymized rough transcripts of the corpus of my Ph.D. dissertation (without voice or visuals to secure anonymity). Other than that, I haven’t made any bugger data set public to researchers. It is pretty challenging in my field since in ethnographic research you encounter and record (narratives of) quite sensitive situations that cannot be made open in any way. Further, I work a lot with visuals as well (I also teach visual ethnography) which means locations and people can be identified from materials. So I need to be extra super strict not to share anything my participants wouldn’t want to share themselves with the whole world…
  4. Using open educational resources: now that my job includes the continuous development of a study specialization and its courses (in a team, of course), I continuously browse for open sources, and adapt them to the purposes of such courses (if licence makes it possible).
  5. Networking online: I regularly ask colleagues to share ideas and resources, both offline and online. I’m also member of a project (IKI – Innovatiivisen kielikasvatuksen kartta ja kompassi, roughly ‘The map and compass of innovative language education) which helps teachers to make their good practices visible to all.

The keywords presented from Laura Czerniewicz’s conference paper made me think about different ways in which the idea of open education can get distorted. In my case,  making a course open means that learners can work flexibly but they still get enough support and their learning doesn’t become incoherent and/or fragmented. Further, will all materials we share with them make sense to them without teacher’s support? No I am in the process of making open materials for a self-study course which will not include teacher support (we don’t have any resource allocated for that), so how will that work? Do we liberate learners from teacher control, or do we actually just abandon them?