Lesley Anderson

Meeting 7

Tonight we got together and finalised our recommendations. Even though it has been a hard slog and each member of the group has had their challenges, I think we have really pulled together as a group to create them. It has been amazing watching that final document evolving over the last couple of days and see how contributions were made for the good of the group and its overall goal - not for individuals. No-one was precious about the writing and we edited and revised what went on the page as well as discussing in the chat window of Etherpad, about the best way to go about things, whether things looked right or made sense. Overall, I think that this was probably the best learning session of all - thanks to RedPod members Liz, Ben and Mel.

Meeting 6

Wow, I am actually quite blown away after tonight’s meeting. I really think RedPod outdid itself tonight. It has been a pretty long haul this semester for most of us. Personally I have found the constant input quite difficult - with two subjects at CSU, a family to cater to as well as work. I know I will never take on this workload again and I began to think that none of it would come together.

It looks like we have just abou achieved it after tonight, though.  This was our meeting to put together all our findings and make some recommendations to our CIO in our Podtask scenario. As we needed to be able to edit our work together we decided to meet in Etherpad so we could take advantage of the interactive pad we could use to write on together. Our meeting began at about 8.30 - had to be a little later because Liz is an hour and a half behind us. We chatted and worked and chatted and roused each other and worked some more and joked around a bit.  Our meeting ended just after 11.00pm and we had the major part of our document done. I was impressed with the way we collaborated on this document it was a great job. Not so good was Etherpad, we had quite a few issues with it dropping in and out which was a nuisance, but, as we were all determined to get this done - we worked around it.  I am hoping to get into Etherpad again tomorrow and do some tweaking so that our document is just about ready for another meeting tomorrow night to finish off.  An excellent, productive, meeting.

PS - Liz and I have both spent some time on Etherpad today and we have a great document nearly ready to be published.  Tonight we should zoom through to get it finished.

Meeting 5

Just the girls met tonight, as Ben was busy, being a Satuday evening.
Mel and I met together first as Liz wasn’t able to join us until a little later - due to the time difference.

I helped Mel with setting up pages in the blog we have set up at http://redpod.wordpress.com/.  We had made a group decision to create pages for the blog instead of using categories as our information will be static and we need to access it all in one place.

Mel had the blog site open and I helped her with step by step instructions on how to set up a page, write to it and publish it as Mel hadn’t used Word Press previously.  I actually enjoyed the interaction and seeing the blog change as Mel worked on it at her end and I was checking it to see how she was going.

Meeting 3

After Ken’s message back to the whole group - prompted by Liz’s email to him, I’m guessing - all seems well for RedPod again. As teachers, we are used to setting up collaborative activities and it makes sense to us to approach this task in that vain. We had a great discussion tonight about just what collaborative activities are and how they are set up and organised. 

Now that everyone is on the same page and happy with the direction we are taking we can move forward with the main part of the task - the research and investigation. I am working on the use of Skype for Professional Development and I have started looking at lots of different websites already.

I’m hoping to have something ready to post to the blog ASAP.

Meeting 2

I have been hanging on to my reflections on the Pod meetings - don’t know why. 
Thought it was time to publish them.

After this group meeting all the members were left feelin quite confused and unsure of exactly what we were going to do.  At the end of  the last meeting we thought we had it covered but further discussion opened up a whole can of worms. We are now unsure whether our original plans will actually cover all aspects of the task and the subsequent assessment.

We made a decision, that Liz would email Ken again and get a little bit more information and clarification - just to make sure.  This is a bit of a nuisance as we all really want to get started with the task.  We are working well together, though and the discussions are great.

I’m sure we’ll be on our way soon.

Meeting 1

As the date for our pod assignment was getting closer and we seemed to have little success facilitating meetings RedPod decided to meet on Friday 2/10/09 at about 8.30 pm using Skype as a meeting network.  We decided to use Skype as we had been chatting on it and found it a successful way to talk to each other. That time was chosen because one of our members - Liz Evans lives in Darwin N.T. and we needed to take into account the time difference.

The decision to meet was made by three of the pod members - myself, Liz and Melenna as we chatted on Skype the night before. We all felt we needed to make a start on our assessment and my thoughts were to try and get it up and running before my school holidays finished.

The pod has 2 other members - Ben, who was unavailable to attend and Shin for whom we had no contact details as this member didn’t appear to be using the forum and had not attended any previous attempts to meet.  We did post a message to the subject forum, just in case either of the other members were available.

During our meeting we did make some decisions about how we would address the assessment.
We decided to create a new blog purely for RedPod and use it to write our ideas and recommendations for the final assessment. This blog would become our group’s collaborative space and we would have all our research and information in one place.
We also decided to post reflections on the assessment, and logs of the meetings to our personal blogs.

We made these decisions knowing that other members of the pod needed to be informed and contacted - Liz volunteered to do this and I volunteered to create our new blog using WordPress.
http://redpod.wordpress.com

Our group also decided to take a social network each to begin researching in order to make a start on our assessment and meet again on Wednesday 7/10/09 at about 8.00pm for first discussions.
I created our blog and customised it a little to be suitable for the pod and I also created some categories to get us started.

Here we go…………

Social networks case study

Who is following who? Exmaine the blogs in your POD and
work out the map of Followers/Following relationship.

This Social Networking diagram shows the group of followers of the blogs belonging to RedPod.  It is colour coded according to the Pods all followers belong to.

Assign each person a letter in the same order as they appear in the dialogue as a, b, c .. etc.
For your chosen extract, draw the social network diagram and build the same matrix of 0 and 1’s as per figure 1. Descibe any patterns of people’s interactions that you discover.
If you were to repeat this analysis on another set of blogs from another POD,
would you find the same patterns?
Why or why not? [HINT - changes in context and process may be just some variables to consider]
Support you opinion with any of the reference provided or with others you find.    

The RedPod meeting that this dialogue was extracted from and from which the data was extracted was certainly full on.  In fact most of the meetings our Pod has held have been the same.  I did notice, as I looked over the dialogue that we talk about a lot of other things besides the task at hand but there seems to have been great discussion about what we have been doing, how we are doing it and what we have achieved.  This discussion was highly motivated too All members contributing at some stage, to the discussion, is reflected in the table above.  We all talked to each other at some stage of the conversation.  The diagram is fairly mundane as is the table.

One thing, these items don’t show is ‘how much’ each member of the group contributes to dialogue and conversation.  Perhaps a diagram with weighted edges as suggested by Hallinan[i] in the second of her lectures - “Networks” would better do that?    Weighting or colour coding edges could certainly aid in showing which members of the group were most actively engaged during discussion and interaction.

The type of dialogue is not reflected - agreement or disagreement, questioning or explanatory, or reveal relationships between group members. Tone certainly is not evident and that is difficult to gauge from text alone - unless it is obvious that someone is unhappy with what is going on in a discussion and expresses it adequately.

The way I have displayed my social networking diagram is not indicative of the direction of conversation either.  It basically makes the statement that at some stage during the conversation person A spoke to person B. Having the table in front of you helps a little - in this case we know that person B did speak to person A but we don’t know where in the conversation this occurred.

There are certainly factors that I believed influenced this and other of our Pod discussions.
The timing of our meeting - we had not yet started with our pod work and had had a few hiccups with how we would approach the work and workload in order to fulfil the requirements of the task set for us.
With a general feeling of urgency and need to complete work within a time frame it is much easier to get discussion happening and keep it on track.
Time zone differences - we had to make the most of the time when we were all able to get together to discuss things as one of our members is one and a half hours behind us. Not that it has caused any real problems, but I do think it makes us frugal with the time we have together.
The nature of the work - knowing that this is assessment material also helps to keep us efficient with our meeting times and stay relevant to the goal we are trying to achieve.
Size of the group - only four members discussing things over distance, makes the discussion much more productive and makes all the data look neat and tidy - there’s really not that much to handle.

If these restraints and pressures from outside the group were not there, if we had unlimited amounts of time to work together and get our task finished, if we had to communicate across a huge group of people over distance and were not all working toward a common goal,  things might well be different.  Kirshbaum[ii] talks about complex systems as being self organising - they adjust naturally to increase their efficiency and effectiveness, in response to so many stimuli from the environment around them as well as being affected by the nonlinear change that happens within them. It is amazing that all of it occurs without us even realising it.   

 [i] Hallinan, J 2005, Introduction to Complex Systems, <http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp4001/>, accessed 21 October 2006.

 [ii] Kirshbaum, D, 2002, Introduction to Complex Systems, <http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm>, accessed 21 October 2006.

I decided to actually take a look at a larger dialogue to compare with my original data. 
This table and the second Social Networking Diagram have been generated from dialogue from the group’s Etherpad discussion on the 5/8/09 and, even though there is only double the number of members in this discussion excerpt the picture is quite different - in both the table and the diagram. I remember feeling at the time, how disjointed the meeting felt as members of the group came in and left randomly.  The table also shows dominance by a couple of the group members and the dialogue actually reflects this - with their names coming up more often in the conversation.  It also shows polarising to a certain degree - this was quite early in our semester of work and people were still finding their way, getting to know others and understand how things would work.

Using Facebook - Wednesday 9/09/09

Working together to get things done!

Ken sent an email on Tuesday 8/09/09 which included an invitation to join the ITC 510/ITC 213 Facebook site in preparation for an online collaboration with the group on Wednesday.  Unfortunately I was unable to get the links etc to work for me, so I was unable to join the group. 

For one of our earlier topics, there was mention of a 510/213 Facebook page and I had gone searching for it.  Unable to find it - it is fairly well hidden apparently, I created a page that was accessible to the group and used the picture here as our ID.

I am only new to Facebook, so I’m still getting my head around it. My older children have been using it for ages and much prefer it to other online pages such as MySpace.  I think it is a great, personal, quick and easy way to keep in contact, either by instant messaging/chat or leaving messages on someone’s “wall”. Read the rest of this entry »

Using LC_Moo - 2/09/09

Using the Moo environment was definitely a new experience for me. I got my user name and log-in about 2 hours ahead of the conference meeting. It had arrived in my emails during the day, but I was unable to access it due to work committments. It took me several attempts to actually get onto the site, into the right place and work out how the site worked. I downloaded some of the user files and printed out a list of commands but I really don’t feel I had enough time to look around before the conference began.
Because of this lack of time and understanding of the site and its operations I felt like I was a bit out of my depth with the experience.  I also found that, although the conversation was entertaining while the group was  in the moo, it was disjointed and a little distracting.  I was expecting some real conversation about the tasks, and essays for the subject but that unfortunately didn’t eventuate.
As a secure site - requiring specific invitation and issued user name and password, I could see how an environment like this would be ideal for an educational situation. It would certainly create opportunity for group discussion and  lateral thought - particularly if students are creating rooms or artefacts within them,  following particular instructions about how to use them and perhaps instructing others on how to use the site as well. Being a bit unusual would probably appeal to students as they learn the idiosyncracies of using the site. Unfortunately it left me a little cold but I would be willing to explore the Moo further - perhaps with my POD group?

Make a up a social profile at two new social networking sites,
using one from each list or from any you found online.

Liz Evans - a fellow  member of Red Pod created a Ning site for our pod. Consequently I have created a new social profile there and I have also created profiles at  Twitter and Diigo in an effort to expand my Personal Learning Network. 
After installing a plug-in to my blog that enables me to insert tables - for my last posting, I am now trying to link my Twitter page to my blog - I definitely enjoy a challenge!