Some initial results and reflections on the blended course

The students in my group have now gone off into school placements for a couple of months, but before going, we captured some of their ideas and thoughts about the course they have been following. Two immediate ideas have become apparent in their views:

1. They enjoyed keeping the blogs on geographical concepts, and in several interviews carried out with students, they commented on the essentially liminal nature of the exercise. They saw the blogs as being a positive medium for playing around with ideas and developing a deeper understanding which not only allowed them to feel more confident in their own consideration of the concepts, but which also helped them cross a cognitive threshold in relation to teaching others about their concept. Interestingly, one student actually described their blog as a 'safe' space for carrying out this liminal transition, even though it was open to the world.

2. The use of pre-session lectures online, led to a strong belief that better use was made of the face-to-face sessions. Students have also remarked that these were positive not only due to the social constructivist nature of the exercises, but that these were supported by a physically flexible learning space which allowed them to stamp their own preferences on the use of the space.

As such, very much preliminary consideration of the rich seam of data collected suggests that the blended approach has helped to transform the nature and benefits of the course thus far.

Blending between F2F and online learning

Completed a short group interview towards the end of last week. This was really interesting as we have adopted an approach to learning sessions which uses a basic structure which is shown below:

There is a pre-session PowerPoint online which allows students to effectively patch in to an online lecture. As a result this has been completed before they come to the F2F session. This leads to a use of social and/or active learning as soon as they arrive for the session. As a result, the whole of the F2F session is given over to a number of different activities from discussions as a whole group to simulations, group work, and resource development and production.
After the sessions, there are personal learning units which the students can complete if they want to take their studies further in that particular area, giving them the opportunity to specialise and reflect to a greater depth on areas that they feel are important or which they are interested in.

This has led to a developing community of inquiry, and appears to work in a very similar way to the approach to blended learning advocated by Garrison and Vaughan in Blended Learning in Higher Education

Creating a flexible space

As well as developing computer mediated learning through the use of blogs and wikis, I'm also trying out a different way of organising the physical space in my teaching area. With collapsible tables and netbooks, as well as four small whiteboards around the walls of the room, I've been able to make the space far more usable, even though the space available for 14 students is limited. In past years the tables have been set out in a conference layout, with little movement of furniture etc for activities.

Now, we tend to keep the tables together in a conference format when in individual or paired work, like above. However, the students have been given the choice of how to set the room up for all learning activities, and as a result are using the space far more creatively, especially in conjunction with the netbooks available. this second photo shows how the students have reorganised the room to complete an exercise on designing an 'eco-city'. The activity had been uploaded as a basic website onto the VLE which they could access via the netbooks. They grouped the tables and then used the information from the website and links to the web with the whiteboards to note down ideas and draw their designs before coming back to the group to present their ideas - some using power point to summarise ideas through the digital projector. In talking to the students after the activity there was an obvious feeling that they played a large part in deciding the organisation of their own learning space and found the simple addition of whiteboards extremely useful to their learning. As such, they felt that the integration of ICT and flexible space is a real positive.

Liminality

The student teachers with whom I'm working are presently developing some blogs which are intended to help them think about the meaning of core geographical concepts (e.g. space, place, globalisation) which are the central point of the new Key Stage 3 curriculum (for 11-14 year olds) for Geogrpahy in England. The intention is to give them some 'space' in which they can build a series of links, create some thoughts and generally 'play' with the ideas in a relatively informal, yet public, setting. As expected there are a variety of reactions, but for all there has been a clear willingness to search for interesting and creative material on the web and a belief that the exercise is helping them think more creatively and investigate resource sources that they would otherwise not have considered previously.

Can these perspectives and developments be seen as the creation of 'liminal space'? Liminality is an idea, popularised by Victor Turner (a cultural anthropologist) that focuses on rites and rituals of passage. As the individual passes from one section of society to another, they are at a point on a 'threshold', being neither a member of one or other part of society. This has seemingly been broadened out as a concept to cover the general notion of 'in-betweeness'! The students are developing their blogs, the end result being a twenty minute lesson which they must present to others in the group focusing on their given concept. As such, can the development of the blog and the learning which takes place there be seen as a liminal space? Are they moving through a transitional space from understanding a concept to some degree, to being able to teach other students about it? As such does this constitute liminality?

Getting started

I'm currently developing a blended learning approach to work I do with student teachers. I'm interested in both Web 2.0 applications and flexible/agile physical learning spaces. As a result, I've taken the plunge over the past month or two to set up a very different course for my PGCE geography students. The basic idea of the blend is given in the diagram below:

The VLE component of the approach I'm taking acts as both a store of information and resources, and a platfrom for reflective personalized learning units which students can use to deepen and broaden their understanding of an area of work. They are also working in pairs to develop a series of blogs focusing on the concepts which make up the Key Stage 3 (11-14 year olds) programme of study for Geography, e.g. on interdependence etc. These blogs are intended to be a thinking and development space for a 20 minute lesson which each pair will teach to the rest of the group in a month's time. There are various other components which are being developed alongside this.

I've also focused on developing a more flexible physical space for learning. The room which sessions are held in is a standard teaching room with interactive whiteboard and room to seat about 16 students. By introducing webbooks, collapsable tables and four small white boards around the room, we're beginning to experiment with alternative layouts, ways of learning etc to develop alternative learning environments even though we are restircted by the original (early 20th century) architecture.

My main area of interest in setting up these various changes is to develop our understanding of the linkages we want and need to make between the face to face developments and the computer mediated developments.