CEDO 550 Week 2

My experience with online communities has been …
Before answering this question, I am going to clarify what I think "online communities" refers to. At first my mind immediately went to "online classes" but online communities certainly also speaks of social networking online communities as well. My very first experience with an online class was during my undergrad program at UW-Whitewater during my freshman year. That online class was very "sterile" with essentially no communication or interaction with the professor or my classmates. As the student, I basically read from the textbook, answered some questions to a forum that nobody ever read, and took a true/false & multiple choice timed test at the end of the chapter. My experience with online classes at Cardinal Stritch has been much different. In fact, I feel like I know my cohort classmates better than I knew my classmates in other grad classes I've taken prior to starting the MEIT program. My first experience with social networking was 4 years ago, actually just a few months after my son was born. I was sick of trying to send emails with attached pictures to my family and having the emails get bounced back. My sister, who is 4 years younger than me & then still in college, showed me her Facebook page and suggested that I create an account so I could post pictures and share them that way. I cautiously did and have been hooked ever since. Since then, I've been able to connect not only with family members who live hours and states away, but also with classmates and long lost friends. It is a neat way to keep those connections with people who you'd normally lose touch with over the years and miles. In fact, I'm planning my class reunion for this summer and Facebook is the main method of keeping all of my classmates up to date as well as finding out where some of them are.
I believe the biggest benefit of collaborative groups is …

I believe the greatest challenge is/would be …
From a teacher's perspective, I can only speculate since I haven't been in that role yet with online teaching...but I think my greatest challenge is going to be organization. In order to keep track of all of the students and their assignments, it is important to have the class procedures structured as well as how students turn work in. The rubrics need to be spelled out easily so students know what is expected of them as well.

My thoughts regarding the social development and socialization issues are …
I touched on this in my forum post but to sum that thought up, I basically stated that with online classes, some of those social development & socialization issues might not be as apparent as they are in a traditional class. Students probably aren't going to be as quick to make the snap judgments about the other classmates in an online setting because they aren't all physically together in a room. They aren't going to be able to see what people are wearing or how they wear their hair or other nonverbal cues. I think the collaboration and group dynamic in an online setting is neat. By having students work together in groups for certain activities, they are able to learn about each other and socialize with those that they might not do so on their own, similar to in a traditional classroom.