Key issue: how to meet a learner's fundamental needs through facilitation

It's been two weeks since I updated by Moodle blog, mainly because I have been busy learning. And I also have an offline life with two great boys and a lovely wife! More on that later.

Once again I have reached a crunch point. This last week was a great time of collaboration and team building with Tom. The topic of the week on the M4T Advanced was Constructivist Learning through Moodle.

A constructivist approach focuses on setting up a group learning event during which collaborators create a learning artifact which they later reflect upon. Even as individuals we learn by putting our understanding on the line by creating or repairing things. A good car mechanic will learn a little by observing another expert at work solving problems, but he will learn a lot more when he puts this theoretical knowledge into practice. Has the car fault been fixed, do the brakes now work?

Of course the extent that we can learn by doing and making mistakes depends on the nature of the job. But even the skilled surgeon one day has to practice on live human beings. A corpse can be used to simulate a real body but there is no substitute for cutting through living flesh and bone!

Tom and I put our knowledge of constructivist theory to the test on Saturday and boy was it fun. Preparation for the journey was long but free flowing largely due to an ease of communication between us. This was really well supported by good old google docs. We were deeply impressed with this tool as soon as we first jointly edited our business card. Just 2 seconds of delay between edits from both sides of the Atlantic; Last week it proved reliable and flexible enough for us to create a coherent plan for our 90 minute online session with the team. We laid out our activities in around 20 slides in an attractive form that was a useful reference point on the day. As I said to Tom after the event, it gave us the opportunity to plan and with that the flexibility to digress from the plan to meet the needs of the learners on the day.


The needs of the learners
This is what I want to talk about in today's posting. During the last week one of the big topics in the Advanced Moodlers lounge was the need to feel safe and secure within Moodle. Much discussion revolved around this issue of trust. Just as we have techniques to establish trust in our daily offline lives we have conventions that have become established on the web for maintaining trust, essential before a degree of intimacy can been established within a learning environment.

Right now you are reading my blog which is in this case published for the whole online world to see. In reality if you are reading it you probably know me. But I am writing it not with a view to forming a trust relationship. This is just a record of my thoughts. It's a one to many communication. Notice I only mention "Tom" by his first name. He has a right to his anonymity. If he chooses to reveal himself thrugh his own blog that's up to him. So I respect my co-learners need for anonymity.

But once I have learners in a virtual learning environment like Moodle, they have other fundamental needs. Trust is the main one here.

I said I'm at a crunch point. At such points I like to go back to basics and look at Maslow's Pyramid of Needs:

As you see and well remember safety comes right at the bottom as a fundamental need. When we have noone to trust we lose our sense of safety. This has to be maintained within a Moodle. But all the other needs have to be met too. And we should do nothing which might undermine those needs being met.

Once we feel secure we can build friendships. From friendships we derive our confidence in dealing what ever life throws our way. Then of course we can move on to the higher levels of creativity and problem solving which is at the heart of our Moodle work.

Let me pick out the key point in our discussion on feeling safe in Moodle. We need to feel happy about our own identity online. I suggest that this means we are happy with ourselves offline too. Then we need to see that our colleagues are who they purport to be. Then we can build a relationship with them and carry on with our mutual learning journey.

Ian, get to the point!
This is the crunch point right here, and it hurts!
So our shared learning session on Saturday highlighted two major issues for me:

- we had not yet grappled with constructivist learning theory and understood it, we had not completed the set assignments
- we had not got stuck into our Moodle sandboxes sufficiently (Tom excepted) so we were not actually becoming the Advanced Moodlers we are supposed to be turning into

So why on earth are we about to go beyond Moodle? We have not done Moodle yet. What is the rationale behind the curriculum here? Perhaps the assumption was that we all had the skills in setting up forums and other activities in Moodle. This certainly does not appear to be the case here.


So why Second Life?
We are now being urged to dive into Second Life. Second Life does not build on what we have learned so far about being ourselves. Or I am I over-emphasising my personal learning here? Others have different needs which need to be fulfilled. I have found people in M4T to be genuine people  I would like to know thee people in what I call the "Real World". Perhaps the "offline world" is a better term here. I know that some of you out there feel so at home online that "online" equals "real".

I am not trying to say anything profound here, just stating the way I see things.

Right now you might have to drag me into Second Life. I want Moodle, Skype, Google Docs to be a set of tools that let me function in my offline life.

The more I get involved online, the more I see the need to be grounded in offline activities. It could be a great symbiosis I guess. Finally I might get a real balance between on and offline. And I might also learn to switch off when I am not working and R E L A X!

For example, as a skilled ICT person I want to be able to make a living online. I am totally happy with Skype as a tool for chatting and phoning with friends and family all over the world.

This course has already changed my behaviour online, so it must have met a need. This I believe is the need for intimacy and friendship. So now I use chat in Skype a lot more. It helps me sort out my thoughts.

When I write emails or blog entries like this one I feel like I am preaching! But the parishioners have all gone home to chat in Skype! This blogging thing is just a way of gettig something off my chest and it's therapeutic. But communication it probably is not. If you got this far reading my blog for today, then wll done you!

I think one of you pointed out already that blogging is sooo Nineties! It's all about Facebook and Twitter now, two technolgies I could also write about sometime.

What need does Second Life fulfill in someone's life? All those groovy things you can do in Second Life you can do in the streets of Cork and in the surrounding countryside.

Go to the pub and enjoy a pint of Beamish, some live fiddling and the craic!

Walk through a frost covered field and watch the sunrise.

Get a First Life first.

Here's my friend Pius by the way, an IT guy but a real Cork man, always down the pub at sessions He has life SORTED:

Cheers,

Ian