A dear friend has an interesting question for me:
A group of about 30 adults want to explore various themes on the intersections between social care, web skills, various other professional occupations and social media. Possible topics are cyberbullying, safety on the web, collaboration practices. These people have various backgrounds, they are no academics, but they participate in the same course in “real world” – they meet on a weekly basis in a physical classroom. The course starts now and they’ll wrap it up at year-end. How can these people, working in groups of about 5 people, learn to put social themes on the agenda and engage in a collaboration to tackle these issues, using social media?
First thoughts I have about this challenge, based on my own learning at Rheingold U:
– Organize the physical classroom for group discussions (put the desks in such a way that the group members can interact in a natural way).
– For the facilitator: maybe it’s unavoidable to give a slide-presentation, but also try to use a mind map to present the project. The mindmap can be digital and online (I like using Mindjet and MindMeister) but one can use PostIts on the wall or blackboard as well (maybe even better, in a physical context). Make it physically interactive! The learners can use the mind mapping techniques later on for their own group discussions.
– Once the groups are formed and topics are decided, give every group member a role. Someone will be in charge of storing relevant links into a social bookmarking service such as Diigo (one can organize a closed or open group in Diigo, so all group members have access to a central place where they can find their stuff). There’s an instructive video on the Diigo homepage.
Another person will be a searcher, and look for relevant links (the facilitator can give tips about using Google or other engines for advanced search).
Yet another participant can look for central concepts and explain them in a document.
Maybe someone will be a mind map master (all participants can collaborate in drawing the map, and one person could make a ‘clean’ version of it later on), and ultimately someone could write a text/post about the session proceedings.
IMPORTANT: as there are a number of sessions, people should switch roles, so ideally everyone in the group would at least once have done the job of bookmarker, searcher, explainer, mind map master or blogger.
I’m not aware about the specific classroom conditions. Do they have wifi, does every participant has her own laptop? Maybe the facilitator will have to be very flexible…
– Where do these people meet outside the classroom? My friend suggested a Facebook group, and even though I’m in general more in favor of Google+, this might be a good idea because the participants are far more familiar with Facebook (also, in Diigo people can leave comments on links and react on those comments).
– How do the participants reach out to others? As they explore web resources, they can try to find interesting experts/authors on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ and ask them questions using those networks. They could use the Facebook-group to keep each other informed about these conversations.
– What is the objective? The objective could be to make a web document about their collaborative work. This could be a text about how to deal with cyberbullying, for instance. The text could be written in a collaborative way on Google Drive and share it (for certain others or publicly). Or it could be a video of course, posted on YouTube or Vimeo. Or it could be a series of pictures, posted with texts, sounds and videos on Tumblr. Or it could be a Pinterest collection.
– Will others react on those documents? Will they succeed in having an online conversation? That’ll be one of the challenges.
Anyway, these are first thoughts… maybe you, dear reader, have suggestions to make, and I’ll ask around in our Google+ Peeragogy in Action community…
This work by rolandlegrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International