We just finished a fun 3-day HITS workshop! It is tough doing it virtually yet breakout rooms and engaged participants helped! Our challenge was having interdisciplinary groups of educators and researchers form and plan the design and implementation of a case study. Building community is critical, and helping participants form groups and define topics and tasks is difficult in breakout rooms! Nonetheless, I think we did facility some new and promising connections.
Tonight, I wanted to learn more about community and noticed a Lilly 2021 session by Juli Charkes, Mitch Fried, and Sabrina Timperman from Mercy College. They presented a session entitled “Community and Creativity in Pedagogical Spaces,” and Charkes, an instructional designer, explained how motivation and community is needed for learning. Charkes presented a slide that stated “Activating social connectedness activates cognitive ability” and “a sense of belonging is key to learning.” This can be done by social connection: creating common norms and language, knowing student’s names AND stories were highlighted as simple strategies shared by Charkes. The T-Pac Framework was described by Charkes as combining three areas: technological knowledge, content knowledge, and pedagogical knowledge. Technology integration to support community is now part of this. Timperman talked about how they built community with welcome videos, group work, e-portfolios, and icebreakers. Timperman shared their physiology welcome video that has a musical intro, great video clips, and examples of physiology. I love how Timperman started the video with engaging footage of animals and voiceover with questions addressed by physiology. In the video, Timperman also sets expectations and recommendations. I’ve seen several welcome videos, and I do like the incorporation of “big questions” with contact information (to promote approachability) and resources for success. I want to do this for metagenomics and BIT 295! For the icebreaker example, Timperman shared a Padlet assignment in which students were prompted to share an image and two truths and a lie and have peers vote on options. Fried runs the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and spoke about teaching faculty to use videos to make students feel comfortable. Fried stressed the importance of being creative to engage and build community. Timperman used an activity and software that was a virtual question sharing. Students tried to answer questions posted to the site. Timperman also used e-portfolios to compile student work and include metacognitive reflections. This assignment, according to Timperman, helped students combine resources, reflect, and prepare for cumulative assessments. Charkes mentioned something that resonated with me:
Technology, particularly multimedia tools, can help amplify community voices.
Juli Charkes, Lilly Conference 2021
They encourage multimedia use in forum posts. The presenters shared their experience and suggestions. The question and answer part of the session included tough questions about how to start building community. I thought the presenters were honest and supportive. Charkes shared how as a parent of twins in college explained to them the purpose of breakout rooms. Suggestions included having defined tasks and clear expectations, having something to “bring back” to the main room, contribute to a shared document… The audience shared creative ideas: scavenger hunts in which students go around campus and take pictures, a photo summary of a unit using Padlet, playing music. I had not heard about the photograph summary of a unit or session using Padlet. That is super creative and fun! I would love to do that in courses. I find it really motivating that with each session I watch, I learn from other educator totally reasonable and useful activities that I can easily implement.
