Monkey vs Robot

My Beginner’s Questionnaire result was a 16, putting me well into the “presentation” side.  However, my classes are a mix of lectures (interspersed with discussion questions) and student led discussions.  I suspect the the specific course we are imagining while taking the survey will have a lot to do with the results.  Given that I am thinking about my introductory Biological Anthropology course, I find it hard to imagine how/why I would have the students constructing their own knowledge about the relative brain sizes of extinct hominid ancestors.  I do feel that given the nature of the course material, the “locus of control” will be me, but I do need to actively engage the students as much as possible to be effective.

That said, one of the things I’ll be thinking about most this year is how to translate my lecturing style and class discussions into an online environment.  A non-interactive lecture seems fairly easy to present online or in-class, and for that reason I don’t really see the value of keeping large lectures with 100+ anonymous students  in a physical class.  Those sorts of large university courses seem like they would serve the students just as well online.  However, I dislike those courses, and much prefer teaching my community college courses with fewer than 40 students.  I feel that this offers the students a different quality of learning that they often can’t get a big university (big universities of course don’t have what is best for the student’s education as their top priority).  So in thinking about designing an online version of my small enrollment course, I don’t want to loose the potential for interactivity during lectures.  Otherwise the student might as well be sitting in room with hundreds of other undergrads passively listening to a static lecture.

So my pedagogical goals would be to:

1) provide the foundational content for the students,

2) engage them with the materials (something discussion/blog based)

3) reingage and asses their understanding, not their memorization

For the most part I found the 7 Principles article interesting, except:
“It is often easier to discuss values and personal concerns in writing than orally, since inadvertent or ambiguous nonverbal signals are not so dominant.”

I don’t think I generally agree with this.  It is my experience that those nonverbal signals are in fact crucial to a successful conversation about meaningful or difficult topics.  I think that is one of the most serious challenges and obstacles to online communication, the impoverished nature of what can be communicated (my primatology bias may be showing here).   Too often I’ve seen online disagreements spiral into absurdity when instead if it had taken place in a physical classroom it would have been easier to create a constructive disagreement.  I am probably most hesitant about this aspect of translating my classroom discussions into online discussions.  I suspect that ample experience will be what I need to work through these concerns I have.

I will also echo the concerns I’ve read elsewhere on a few of these blogs, that facilitating discussions/interactive learning seems at this stage to be hugely more time consuming online than it is in a classroom.  I know that the move to online content and classes is inevitable, but I see this particular aspect as a net loss for educators, and something that I hope to learn to make the best of with the help of appropriate technology.  Online classes can provide certain benefits that in class courses can’t, but they can’t do everything better.  While I’m not a Luddite, I do recognize the limits of what technology can substitute for.

Herein begins my POT blog.

I am currently juggling:  finishing up my PhD, adjunct teaching at a community college, and experiencing my first year of fatherhood.

My PhD is in Biological Anthropology, specifically primatology, and my dissertation research is on chimpanzee social behavior (for which I spent 15 months frolicking through a Ugandan jungle chasing after my study subjects).

I teach Biological Anthropology here at MiraCosta, and I would like to expand my Luddite style classroom teaching into realms of more sophisticated technology.  I am hoping that the POT will prevail against my natural inertia (thus the tile of my blog) and create a better teacher.

By far the most rewarding and challenging aspect of my life right now is learning how to be a good father to my 9 month old son.  He is a time and energy consuming little beast, so I apologize in advance for the inevitable delays and hasty typos that will plague this blog over the coming year.

That said, I am looking forward to learning from and participating in this pedagogical experience.

Kyleb Wild

*PS:  Diigo registration seemed to work just fine.  Easy peasy.