online learning – Toile & Trouble

Final reflection on a Strange Crochet

On brand, I’m running late. But my recent experience with Open Networked Learning in my PBL group has been on my mind.

I remember several years back, taking a certificate in online teaching & learning – not a very good program to be fair – one focus was to convince us all of the validity of online learning (our context was asynchronous, with forum interaction). Studies show that students achieve the learning outcomes just as well, if not better, online! Also on brand, I couldn’t keep my bad attitude at bay. But what about fun? Isn’t that important? Surely we agree we’re not capturing the magic of in-person interaction? I was met with what I only imagined were blank stares. Nobody jumped on my bad attitude bandwagon.

Measures of success depend on what you are measuring. And as Albert Einstein might have said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” At the end of the day, was it a good learning experience? Yes. Why? I had fun, I experimented, I appreciated my fellow learners, I collaborated, I led, I put my views aside and trusted the group, I was intrinsically motivated, I found comfort in the not-knowing, I was curious, I was safe in the wilderness in good company, I was inspired.

What a wonderful thing, in our last meeting, to reflect on the initial experience of searching for a clear course description and learning outcomes. I am always surprised when a new veil of indoctrination is lifted… neoliberalism and audit culture run deep. The course is the point – the process and not the product – and the resulting feeling that I want to do more, do better, and keep learning. This is what I want for my students – this is the game I play, mapping learning outcomes so everyone feels we aren’t mucking around and wasting time, while simultaneously trying to sneak in some ‘mucking around and wasting time’. If they have fun, and are curious and inspired, the experience is generative – the learning grows beyond the classroom, beyond the temporal limitations of the class, and goodness knows where it goes. I know this because I have experienced this, and because I witness it. However, like so many things that matter, we must approach it obliquely, with faith and tolerance for failure.

And – online learning surpassed my expectations. This experience was an opening-up, a removal of a glass ceiling.

I am so grateful for my facilitators and fellow learners, and I will miss our meetings. I appreciate their diversity and their courage to be outsiders in their perspective – for by being brave in their diversity they improved the whole group. What fun. I’m sad it’s over.

A Strange Crochet Mantle

As the costume designer for our Strange Crochet video production, and taking inspiration from Dr. Marti Cleveland-Innes, teacher as bricoleur, I gathered old materials and brought them together in new ways. Working with these new media, in a different scale, I was clumsy in something that had felt natural to me before. I was forced to make the intuitive explicit, like thinking about breathing. Building new connections left my hands sore the next day.

Process: I took old fabrics that I had no use for and tore them into strips, making big balls of fabric-yarn. Some were hard to tear up, they felt precious, and a friend helped me find courage. I hated it and loved it in many stages of in-between, and I fought the immobilizing power of perfect and not-perfect, embracing the forever becoming.

Designing for online and blended learning requires so much more planning, and yet also requires an openness to shift and pivot as needed. We work to plan the ways our learners interact with the content. We use our imaginations to foresee possible future outcomes and accommodate them, but each human experience is delightfully unpredictable and our learners will inevitably transcend the bounds of our constructed universe. Part of our job, of course, is to rein them back in as needed, but we must also leave room for the spontaneous happy accidents that bubble up so easily in a physical classroom. How do we create a sandbox, and not an obstacle course?