I entered Pepperdine University’s Master’s program in Educational Technology under the leadership of Dr. Linda Polin in July, 1999. (Cadre 2, Blue Crew). Though there were different courses each quarter, one part of the study was spread through the whole year, an Action Research Project (ARP), in which we each proposed an area of study based on our working environment, and documented what we found and how our thinking changed over the course of the year of study.
The following, and the two subsequent postings, comprise the summary of my ARP research, 1999-2000.
What I wanted to do
I wanted to know how to effectively design curricula for online presentation.
I’ve been a teacher for over 20 years, and have designed or help design a lot of different curricula, ranging from cobble-it-together to do-it-yourself.
I didn’t really see the MA in Ed Tech as an investigation at first so much as learning techniques and principles, then getting advice as to how well it would work. Investigation was just the first phase of getting it done.
Why
Previous efforts using Authorware were too time-consuming, even though the product looked nice. After a lot of work, I wasn’t sure that it would really help anyone learn. It was just another nice presentation tool – had some sound discovery elements to it, but I knew it wasn’t a good solution – it took way too long to make, and it wasn’t flexible enough, even though I had tried very hard to put a lot of possible paths into it to sustain interest and maintain flexibility in modes of learning. One of the Japanese administrative staffers that reviewed it shook his head and said, “You’ve put everything in there that you’ve learned in 20 years about English conversation practice… it will take too long to make the lessons at this rate.” He was right, but I didn’t want to just put out something that was pedagogically inept.
What did I think I could do about it?
First Iteration: (June 99)
learn how to design a whole curriculum
I thought I could take some courses, read some books, talk to some people, and I would be able to do the design or lead the design team.
Second Iteration: (September 99)
designing a prototype distance-learning program for English composition
I thought I could get some good ideas from others trying the same thing, talk to some of them, and I would be able to do the design—no problem. I have lots of experience in this. I’ve sometimes had ‘magic’ happen in my classrooms when teaching composition, and I looked forward to the challenge of taking that to a wider audience.
Third Iteration: (November 99)
“I’ve been seeing the applicability of the LPP and CoP concepts as particularly applicable to what I do in my regular job. The change? To complete the process of making missions participation at HGC a community involvement (a CoP), rather than a more “academic” exercise of just “becoming informed” about what others are doing and sending them money. Since we have 2000 people in the larger church community, about 800 involved in financially supporting, and about 200 or so who actively get involved in some kind of action, the COPs will have differing definitions.” “My new ARP centers around Communities of Practice—I will identify some key COPs that I am involved with, and responsible for, and seek to improve the practice in them and create an LPP “on-ramp” for each.”
I was really excited about the concepts – Community of Practice was fairly easy to understand. LPP was harder, but once I saw it, I was eager to move into a ‘program formation’ stage right away. I knew of two very good examples that I believed were good prototypes for what I want to do in other spheres:
A quote from December 99:
“We have a couple of good models of LPP: Touch the World (TTW) and Training in Ministry Outreach (TIMO).
Touch the World is a program for Junior High and High School aged kids which trains them and sends them to serve in inner-city, camp, and cross-cultural environments. Short trips are taken during spring break or Christmas break, and trips from 10 days to one month are taken during the summer. The key to this program is learning while doing. And now in its ninth year of existence, the program works better than ever because of the kids that do it again and again, who help the leaders train the newbies. All three of my kids have been involved in multiple trips, and have become a part of the informal leadership. I am also part of the training team for the summer trips, involving about 250 kids.
TIMO is the program used by Africa Inland Mission to train their new missionaries who will be planting churches in situations where there were no previous churches, either in remote areas (such as the one I visited in Tanzania) or in urban areas among ethnic enclaves untouched by current church congregations due to language or extreme cultural differences. I wrote about their program briefly in my Learning Situation paper.
- Training in Ministry Outreach is the program I was assisting during my two trips to Tanzania. It is designed to train fledgling missionaries in the skills they need to learn a language and plant a church. I was able to observe the Sukuma, French and American team members during a two-week period last year, as they were beginning their second and final year of training, and able to see the final results as all of the members have now graduated on to other assignments this year.
- TIMO members (including a Tanzanian couple [Sukuma tribe] from an urban area for whom the adjustment is just as great as for whites) undergo a rigorous training which includes very little bookwork but a lot of practical training. The heart of it is learning how to live among a tribal people, learning their language and customs, and contributing to the community through building and teaching, or by sharing any medical skills they may have.
- The team members learned how to eat strange foods, cope with sickness, drive 4WD vehicles in the bush, use basic medicine, purify water, cook in a variety of settings with wood, charcoal, propane, etc., build a brick or mud and wattle house, and fix and maintain all of the equipment they brought with them. They also learned important attitudinal lessons in humility, sharing, reliance on others and when and how to give advice.
- The chief methods of learning and teaching centered around the modeling they observed in the team leaders, a veteran couple who love the life there and poured their lives into the people. The LAMP book (Language Acquisition Made Practical) was their beginning tool for language study, but they learned mostly from their host families and from each other, since the Datooga language is not understood by hardly any outsiders.
- Learning styles included imitation, mutual storytelling, discussion, reflective questioning, delegated responsibility, and evaluation. Active learning, learning while doing, achieved the practical skills necessary.
- I observed the two families that were still in the area. They were highly successful, their attitudes good, and their standing among the community secure—they were respected and loved, listened to and helped. They had truly learned all of the skills necessary to prosper with very few classroom sessions.
- I believe there is merit in further analyzing why these two models work so well, and what is possible for us to adapt in our wider church situation in bringing people from non-involvement into the [other active CoPs in the church]. Structuring active participation will be the key.”
I was still working on others, not so much working on myself…
Fourth Iteration: (Dec 99)
So the key to all of this as far as I can see it now is to create an atmosphere of learning by doing – but not just throwing everyone into the pool, sink or swim. We want to create an authentic atmosphere of doing what is really useful – and help each other learn how to do our service, our communication, our organizing, our planning, our financial management, our time management, our language study, our “attitude adjustments” – we want to learn together how to do it all better!
Put communities of practice in charge of their learning (Wenger 96)
“...subsequently [the listserv] will be used for guided discussion, using a resource called Perspectives in the World Christian Movement, a text currently widely used to train missionaries and laypeople who help them. Many of our current missionaries took their training long enough ago that they are unfamiliar with the concepts and updated information in the text. I will try to put into practice a number of the suggestions delineated in (Ryan 97) and (Sharp 96, 97), but until I have had a chance to talk these over with critical friends and some of the missionaries, I don’t know which are applicable.
I hope in so doing to create a community of discourse (Sharp 97) which will encourage our missionaries to reflect, dialogue and ultimately improve their practice.”
(March 2000)
” And in December, I introduced a listserv which I use at least weekly. The next step is to invite discussion in an asych environment. Because of the difficulty of communication for 15 or so of our missionaries – bad or very expensive connections – I have to make adjustments in the way I introduce the technical “challenge”
- some of the missionaries don’t have internet access – just email. For them, participation would mean reading a transcript of a discussion and adding to it, if their contribution is not too far out of the time sequence. In Tanzania, access to a server might only be twice a month.
- a newsgroup is one of the best ways to have threaded discussions, and intranets.com allows this for free – this would work in the technical sense except for those who do not have internet access, but the time necessary to log on, read, respond, etc., may prove to be a barrier to acceptance.
- we can use the listserv itself if we limit our discussions to one topic at a time, but we have to allow people to opt out if it costs them money (access fees based on long-distance or sat phone charges) to participate – unless they are willing to pay the costs for the value received (creation of a discussion-only listserv is one good possibility here)
- a BBS type of posting – www.eboard.com – the browser barrier holds true for this one as well, but it is the least challenging and least intrusive, since a listserv posting goes to everyone
I believe the next step will be to simply ask a few of the missionaries to try a couple of the alternatives and then we will seek to recruit involvement by the majority.”
The displays showing our ARPs – July 2000
References:
Ryan, S. 1997
“Building An Online Community “http://builder.cnet.com/Business/Community/
Sharp, J. 1996
“Notes on Going Virtual” http://www.tfriend.com/cop/n-govirt.html
Sharp, J. 1997
“Key Hypotheses in Supporting Communities of Practice” http://www.tfriend.com/hypothesis.html
Snyder, W. 1997
“Communities of Practice: Combining Organizational Learning and Strategy Insights to Create a Bridge to the 21st Century” http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/cols.shtml
Wenger, E. 1996
“How to Optimize Organizational Learning”
Healthcare Forum Journal, July/Aug 1996, p.22&23
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/olearning.shtml
Wenger, E. 1998a
“Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System”
Systems Thinker, June 98
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml
Wenger, E. 1998b
Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning, and identity
Cambridge Univ. Press
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