A Gentle Hand

A Gentle Hand
by Harold Jarche | Wed, 10/22/2008 - 07:11

On our Work Literacy project we have been discussing Web social media tools and how they can be used for training and education. Several groups have been created within the course of over 700 members and one of these is educators. Bill Graziadei has been very active with the group and showed how you can create a Glog, which is a mash-up of various Web tools and creates a personal portal that can also be used as a road map for students. Here is piece of Bill's glog:

 

 

This course of over 700 registered is happening concurrently with another free online course call Connectivism and Connected Knowledge, facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. That course has over 2,000 members signed up. There is a real thirst for knowledge about social media and how the Internet can be used for learning. However, there is no single best way to approach it, as it's a complex environment and we need different cognitive skills than those we have used for more traditional teach-test courses. There are no right answers on these courses, only ways of making parts of this more personal and being able to apply some of it in our daily lives.

Perhaps the single most important thing that I have learned is that these types of courses can scale to a much larger size than a class model, because as they grow the members themselves pick up the roles of facilitators and guides. As Paul Lowe said in his recent webinar on Reflective Practice Using Blogs, the role of the instructor is that of a "gentle hand".

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