LearnHub

This is not a lesson, and should be in discussion (I’m joking)

The poetic justice is this is a Lesson/Discussion/Debate

Meri, Nellie, Andrew, I just want to contribute for now, that I enjoy your discussion/debate about discussion/lesson, which is a lesson that teaches me how enriching it is to make differences! I will take “Is/Was this a lesson?” to my classrooms :))) Thanks!!

Hi, I am Dr.R. Permit me to study the thumb-index-finger slot with blue squire and light blue three clouds seen only through the slot. This depiction below the title invites and inspires to take different angles to differentiate Lesson, Discussion and Debate through the slot of conventional views. When the attention is shifted to the result /out put of all the three, the answer is wholesome and holistic knowledge. All the three are needed to reach the fourth experience.

Great! I’m not the only one that was caught unprepared when i found out about LearnHub!

The Discussions and Debates distinction makes no sense to me. I think Debates should be renamed “surveys”. I disagree at an ideological level with the very idea of debate, where participants have to entrench themselves with an idea and defend it with their lives. Instead, especially in a learning environment, the search for truth should be the guiding star of every “discussion”. Debates don’t really allow for that.

I do use debates as a technique to uncover mental models in my (offline) workshops, but i think this requires a fluidity of interaction that doesn’t translate very well in an online environment.

As anyone that has spent some time participating in online forums knows, debates often come down to pretty unsatisfying results, including the infamous “godwin” ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=godwin )

So, debates i’m not too happy with in LearnHub, though surveys could be interesting. I am thinking pre-post surveys for instance, that a trainer could use to quantify knowledge appropriated in a lesson or course for instance. Surveys on opinions and preferences are ok too (are you enjoying this lesson? Is it too basic/advanced? etc.)

Since we’re on this topic, i am not too happy about lessons either in their current format… :D I think they come to discussions too often. Where is the good old verticalness? :D Where is the facilitator’s content made effectively visible? Is it just the first post in a discussion? I am fascinated with the idea that any participant can post a “lesson”, in a community that i created, but i think that “actual training content” should be differentiated from “just discussions”. Too trainer centered? call me old fashioned and look out for my debate on the role of the facilitator.

[Sorry about this triple posting, but it seems that i have some sort of a problem with LearnHub, where i can’t do longer posts, or there’s a character limit i am not aware of, of there’s a connection issue (i’m in Bolivia). The only way round it seems to be to post shorter stuff. This is probably why i can’t post my lessons on online collaboration training] :(

So, I’m really appreciating the amount of thought and effort you’re putting into posting, Vahid! And I’m going to take a cue from your comments and open another debate. Not to be contrarian, but to see what happens with the debate architecture.

I’m not sure the debate architecture’s not useful. I share many of your feelings about setting up “opposing” points of view. I was trained a long time ago in debate, though, and the training was good for me, mentally. I think it’s made my thinking more rigorous and it certainly taught me to ask probing questions. I trained later in life to be a “facilitator” and I’m just as serious about the discipline it takes to hold a space open for ALL points of view between two poles…

So, I remain curious about how we can use the tools here in creative ways… and see what happens.

One of the things I’m really enjoying about LearnHub is working with the limitations of the architecture. I love breaking things!

Let’s keep trying to break things and see what happens… I don’t think we’re going to hurt anything… grin.

Vahid, I just realized that the architecture is a barrier in a way I hadn’t thought about. This lesson is shared between several communities, but the discussions and debates in the course that it originates in are inside only ONE course. If you want to participate, you’ll need to enroll in Jumpstart Your Online Teaching Career. I’d love to have your participation there…

I know exactly how you feel Vihad, somewhere on here I posted a discussion on a debate thread about how it made no sense to me to have lessons, courses and other discussions and debates. To me a course has lessons, and lessons shouldn’t have other lessons from other people than the original creator.

I am on my way to wikieducator. :)

This comment is based on something Nellie said in her voice thread, that a lesson has, among other things, a beginning, middle and end. What is odd to me about LearnHub’s lessons (and I’ve been playing with them, for, ummmmmmm…., a day!) is that they are seemingly endless. The teacher poses a question and then people comment, comment, comment. But—to what end? Or does the lesson begin, and end, in the original posting created by the teacher? The linearity is odd.

What an interesting observation about the “endless linearity” this kind of architecture is creating, Gretchen. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but now that you mention it, I experience this, too… I’ve been taking for granted that the architecture itself is creating kind of “threaded discussion” that goes on .. and on .. and on.. as long as people keep coming into LearnHub and discovering conversations they are interested in.

In the beginning (meaning back in March, around the beta launch), there were a lot fewer conversations and a lot more re-visiting of the same conversations by a core group of people. At this point, four months out, lessons AND discussions AND debates seem to me to be functioning more like standard asynchronous threaded discussions capable of including rich media … or blog postings that accrue in “topic areas” rather than under the original “author’s” name, the way blogs do.

Your question about where the lesson begins and ends is provocative… and I have no sense of certainty about how I would respond…

Very interested in hear what others think about this…

I wonder if lessons here ever end. Or even if lessons now can end in any format. The speed at which we innovate these days is astounding. A lesson presented today may very well not be accurate by tomorow morning. For that reason I really like the linearity of the threads that grow out of the initial lesson offering. Once the lesson has been posted it is complete until such a time as there is a post beneath it. Then that too becomes part of the lesson which would be complete until the next next post is added thus extending the lesson and hopefully keeping the content, theory and practice around that topic relevant. Should a time come where no more thought is added to the lesson in the form of subsequent posts then that lesson coulde be said to be complete…until such a time as the content returned to top of mind for someone who would at that point gain the knowledge of the initial lesson and have it supported by the commentary that would follow.

The longer I’m involved with Learn Hub, Shouldice, the more I see the truth of what you’re saying here. In a million years, when I posted this lesson last March, I would never have imagined there would have been 3028 page views, not to speak of all the comments that have accumulated. I think we’re evolving something truly new here online – a way of learning together that goes beyond what we used to think of as “lessons,” “discussions,” and “debates.” I continue to marvel at the way our thinking both accumulates and modulates…

I really appreciate you taking time to add your thoughts right now.