Introducing M.O.D.E. Interaction

I've been toying with these ideas for at least five years now. I can't remember exactly how it started, but it had something to do with being interested in different learning styles, and different teaching styles, and how these differences affected the ways in which technology is used for teaching. I was interested in ideas like constructivism and the social construction of knowledge--and had experienced success as a teacher using these approaches--but it felt like there was, at least at times, a disconnect between these ideas and the ways in which (some of) my students wanted to engage in knowledge-building. Not everyone was into interacting in the ways that it felt to me they had to in order to be engaged in these ways of learning.

This became especially clear in my online teaching. The very idea of "discussion" seemed to turn some students off. Some of these students wanted to just get at the content and move on. Others liked to be in the discussion, but just to read it (lurkers)--these students would tell me later what they'd gotten out of the discussion and this would surprise me since I'd never realized they'd even been reading the posts. Then there were students who loved the discussion--the ones who posted early and often, and at great length--loving the back and forth and sharing of ideas, etc.

I began to think about a range of approaches to information sharing that might happen in online discussion boards. What I ended up with is what I'm now calling M.O.D.E. Interaction [pdf]. I've tried some of the ideas outlined here in my online courses, but never put it all together in something this structured.

Recently, I was asked to teach a course in facilitating Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). It's a hybrid course, and I'll use online discussions a lot. It occured to me that the framework I'd been toying might be a great way to manage the discussions because the framework is itself about CSCL in online learning environments.

I'm also using blogs in the course I'm teaching, and I wanted to blog along with the students, so I decided to create this blog as way of documenting the experiences that my students and I have using M.O.D.E. Interaction in the course. I'm looking forward to implementing this at a level I haven't before, and to reflecting on what works and what doesn't.

Here's hoping you find this intriguing enough to use in your own online teaching! I want this to be an "open source pedagogy," and it would be great if others tried out some of these ideas and reported back to me via email or by adding comments to this blog. Just click on the link above, or in the sidebar at right, to download a PDF with my initial ideas about how M.O.D.E. Interaction works.

Anyway, the course starts in two days. Here we go...