Guest Speaker: Chat Room or MOO activity

Learner Group: Any
Group Size: >30
Tool: Chat Room or MOO
Timeframe: 60 minutes
Focus: Meeting an expert



Introduction


This is really simple, basically you can use the fact that it's so very very easy for someone to use a chat room or MOO to entice experts to give you 60 minutes (allow 10 minutes to get set-up, everyone there etc.) of their time in which your learners can ask questions & discuss issues. 


This is also pretty cool as it can get some seriously heavy stuff in seriously concise form (your expert certainly won't be going into the kind of detail that can kill off these things and your learners will be trying to make the most of the time)



Steps


1. First up you need an expert who is willing to give you 60 minutes (and who can type :o)... I'll eave that up to you!


2. Get your learners to complete a small research project (in groups) on the expert and the area they're looking at. A very simple exercise can be to ask them to compose short presentations on that person and their area of expertise, post them a week before the interview and have everyone feedback on them (presuming you're using a discussion board, email or are able to do this face to face)


3. Ask your learners to prepare questions and tell your expert that this is what'll happen (they'll be asked questions).


4. Get everyone together in a chat room or MOO (if you have one in your course, use that, otherwise you might like to look at spaces such as those offered by Tapped In http://ti2.sri.com/tappedin/ or Chatzy http://www.chatzy.com/) and go for it... you can moderate / host. Tell everyone that you'll be saving the transcript and sharing it (you can do this by copying and pasting)


5. After the sessions finished ask learners to review the transcript, select an area that's of particular interest to them, think about the experts opinion and further develop their own. You can then use these to 'spark' group discussions.



Extras & Tips:


-Hosting this kind of thing can be pretty chaotic, I remember participating in one where people kept on getting thrown out by accident and every time someone came in or left the area it came up (which was OFTEN as they kept on getting thrown out!). So... definitely definitely definitely do a trial run first, perhaps to talk about what you're going to do in the actual task. Get all the learners involved and try to eliminate as many tech issues as possible.

project-based learning example

three stages. First, each participant worked off line for a period of time to work on the deliverable individually. Second, after that period of time, the participants would work together in the breakout room to not only discuss their various solutions to the individual work, but also work together to address some higher level questions about that deliverable. Finally, the instructor would come into the breakout room where the group would present their results to the instructor who would assess what they did and ask a number of questions to understand the group‘s rationale for the answers. Using these three stages, we ensured that each individual spent some time working through part of the activity on their own, then contribute to a larger group in the related group activity and finally defend their rationale with the instructor. In this way the instructor was able to assess if the participants achieved the learning outcomes.

team-based collaboration idea

A real time simulation, where students are told to place themselves in the situation of, for example, a team which has been given an emergency issue to deal with, only has 3 hours to produce a solution ....starting now. This will require them to work on line, in a stressful scenario. The instructor observes this process provides immediate feedback if things begin to "blow up" and more detailed feedback based on her observations at the conclusion of the real time sim.

Uses for collaborative break-out rooms in virtual classroom settings:
1. small group brainstorm
2. participants choose room to work with based desire to converse with certain expert "presiding" in the room
3. cross-pollination, ie, jigsaw method
4. touching base for groups at beginning, middle, end of project or process.
5. place to go for help, ie. one-on-one for faculty & student
6. locations for specific group work, ie, to assemble a whole project from individuals' unique contributions
7. location for best practices for procedures, ie. use of whiteboards, posting,
8. debriefing location

Ron Kantor, Dan Bielenberg and Jeff St Yves of Accenture. from Collaborative Learning 2004.