results this semester

The success of the blogs was dramatically different this semester. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to do some detailed analysis of what I saw, but I’ll start with an overview. There was one major difference with the research blogs this time: the students were working on a group project. To make the blogs more useful to them, I had them all link to each others’ blogs. Their final project was far and away the best group project I have ever seen from a class. These kids really inspired me! I had individual exit interviews with all of them and I asked them “What do you think made your group project go so well?” I got lots of interesting comments, and many said they used the blogs a lot–not just for their own reflection and research, but to pop in and see waht others were doing. sometimes this helped them get started or get inspired. Sometimes it helped increase group cohesiveness and communication so that work didn’t get duplicated. It made group work easier. And not one one of them said they had a bad group experience–that is amazing. All of them reported having bad group experiences in the past. I plan to explore more about this as well as I look over their work from the semester. what I believe I am seeing is this: I put lots of tools in place to build community: collaborative quizzes, theory discussions over breakfast, group work with the videos, peer reviewing papers, group spaces in blackboard, etc. Then I let them go. The students picked up those tools, used them, and really internalized the concepts of the class. It was a case of the right tools for the job. George Siemens would say that I have stumbled upon Connectivism, I think.