Now if I go now to a community, I'm going to go to just one community and this
particular community we're looking at here is an engineering course at the University
of Illinois with which I've been involved as we're doing a research project there.
And the professor in this course is Jenny Amos.
The other people listed there are various teaching assistants, research assistants.
In fact, it's a pretty small class.
There are only nine members in this particular class.
But the interesting thing is about, this is about time and space that I'm talking,
is that two of the students are actually in Sierra Leone in Africa.
And this course is about technology innovation where
there are limited resources in medicine.
So medical innovation or technology innovation for
medicine in places where there are limited resources.
Now all of these items in the activity stream did come up of our big activity
stream along with a zillion other things.
But this is a filtered down version just of the activity happening
in this activity, in this particular community.
And as you can see it's an infinite scroll in the same way that Facebook and
Twitter have infinite scrolls.
Now one thing that's different about this is, is we allow you to filter activity
which of course Facebook and Twitter are never going to allow.
Because they're going to decide what they want to sell to you, and
they're going to decide what gets prioritized in your feed.
I am going to go into one of the updates now inside this course, engineering 298.
And this is an update made by the professor on Sustainable Design.
And you can see here, she's put in some text.
She's also has put some audio in line.
>> Seen technologies for global health purposes.
>> What she's done is she's chunked it up into small pieces, a minute here.
>> As has been mentioned many times.
>> Two minutes there, a diagram here, some illustrations, some points, and so on.
And in fact this is the 21st century version of a lecture,
it's not just a video like the flip classroom.
It's a combination of media which are put together, which includes,
little fragments which are part of a lecture, includes ticks,
might include an article to read and so on.
But most importantly, it's not just telling, it's beginning a dialogue, okay?
And this is the beginning of the students responses to that dialogue.
Every single student responds.
And they start talking to each other, see @Alison, @David.
And this is classical, and by the way, if I want to join the conversation, I
just go add a comment, add a comment down the bottom and that goes into the string.
So this is classical classroom discourse.
But the interesting thing is, It doesn't matter that the students are not together,
they could all be together.
So if you've got 100 students in a lecture theater,
they could all be talking in this space live, and talking to each other live, and
talking to each other much more effectively I might say,
than simply turning to the person beside them and talking to them.
It could be live and it could be in the same space, but
also it doesn't have to be.
So in this case, it's something that happened overnight, and
there were student in Sierra Leone who were able to join into this space.
But the important thing is that whether it's live or not, it's very different from
classroom discourse in ways that I'm going to describe and analyze in a moment.
But also there is no difference between the form of discourse whether its
in person at the same time or at a distance and asynchronous.
To give you an example of one other kind of activity in this space,
this is the kind of space that also gives students an opportunity
to be the textbook themselves, to make contributions,
to be knowledge producers and not just consume the content, and
react to the content given to them by the professor.
So for example in this week, all the students had to talk about one particular
type of disease and possible responses to that disease.
In this case this particular student was talking about cholera and
diarrhea diseases, and this was their post.
So they were actually creating content, sourcing that content.
So their knowledge was not just based on their opinion,
it's actually building really substantial content, knowledge and sourcing it.
And then the other students are responding to it.
So what we've done here is we've really reconfigured the student as a knowledge
producer.
Again, whether this is happening with a real live classroom, in real time,
or whether it's happening asynchronously with people not in the same space,
the architecture makes no difference.
And in both cases,
I would argue it's a superior architecture to classical conversation.
Now I'm not trying to say that classical conversation should go way,
it's going to be there.
But there are many great advantages in this form of discourse which I'm
going to talk about now.
But my main point really, is it blurs the boundaries which were the classical
boundaries, the confinements of time and space in the classical classroom.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisProfessor
