John Peterson and Anders Eriksson meet Rockwell and Larsson
We held our Video Conference number 6 today. John Peterson's PWR 1 class met with Anders Eriksson's class to analyze the representations of cultural identity embedded in paintings by Norman Rockwell and Carl Larsson. We set up 7 rooms all over Wallenberg Hall (see Chris's last post about space) and asked students to work in globally-distributed teams to analyze a painting and then present their rhetorical findings to the rest of the teams. It worked particularly well, with students offering a high level of rhetorical theory and understanding. Here's a screenshot of the Marratech interface with one of the student groups presenting out.
We were lucky to have Eva Magnusson here visiting in person! Bob Smith and Justin made it possible, and Chris was heroic again, as were her children, Max and Miranda, in charge of technology in the Basement Rooms of Wallenberg (they were our tech support team). Evelyn Kung provided her expert analysis as a graduate student from Learning, Design, and Technology, and soon she'll have reports to post on this blog to make us accountable to our research design.
What I think made this workshop particularly smooth was a combination of factors:
1. John and Anders met several weeks ago via Marratech to customize our template lesson plan to their chosen content. As a core team member and CCR project director, I helped facilitate this meeting to support both instructors -- we are moving to a model of increasing ease. Chris and I were joking today that we could create a "fast food menu"of workshops to minimize the work interested instructors would need to do, and yet allowinf for instructors to customize the lesson plan to their particular pedagogical needs.
2. Chris made a terrific custom webpage for ease of access during the workshop: students could go HERE (http://www.stanford.edu/group/ccr/workshops/021908.html) to open the slides, the lesson plan, the switching instructions. And with this, we are now GREEN! Less paper.
3. Ease of flow and dedicated rooms. In Orebro, Anders prepared the students in the hour preceding the videoconference. Here at Stanford, Andrea Lunsford, Evelyn, Miranda and myself met the students downstairs to greet them and give them an overview of the purpose of this activity (very important). John had established groups ahead of time. We led the students to the rooms, and the lesson plan flowed, with a strong introduction by Anders and John and then the students moving into their teams. It was essential to have students working in dedicated learning spaces with simulated proximity to their colleagues through video, audio, chat and whiteboard capabilities. The class ended with presentations and a debrief!
Today was a success - our sixth workshop since January 28, and perhaps our 30th since we began this project. I look forward to reflecting more on the progress and improving on what we have built here.
In two days, we travel to Santa Barbara to share this work with colleagues from around the world at the Writing Research Across Border conference.
Comments
Just to chime in -- I was particularly pleased with how well this workshop went because on a symbolic level it was so significant. When we were just contemplating the whole Workshop template last spring, John Peterson stepped forward and wanted to be our guinea pig, so to speak. Well, last spring, that very first workshop of all time (with Anders too!) went very well -- but yesterday went even better because of all the ways that we've streamlined and fine-tined the videoconferencing procedure. Yay, team!
Posted by: Christine Alfano, Stanford | February 20, 2008 06:36 AM
From my perspective as the graduate student intern from the Program in Learning Design and Technology, I found that the cultural mixture of the traditional (Larsson & Rockwell paintings) and the modern (Orebro and Stanford) brought to many surprises to the workshop.
This time, John Peterson and Anders Eriksson, the lecturers of the six workshop, held on Feb.19, had led students to explore art with four famous paintings: Santa Lucia and Girls in Mamma’s Room by Carl Larsson of Sweden; Freedom from Want and Breaking Home Times by Norman Rockwell of America. The main difference of curricula between the past workshops and this one was the extension of the contents—broadness or depth. Compared to other workshops, students of the sixth workshop had plenty of time to discuss and go in depth a painting because each of the groups needed to deal with only one.
During the collaborative time, students identified many clues such as colors, objects, and contexts of these paintings that could present American and Swedish cultures. For example, in Breaking Home Times, the employment of red, blue, and white colors represented Americanism; in Freedom from Want, the context of the thanksgiving celebration revealed an American custom which did not exist in Sweden.
This workshop raises a great issue regarding curriculum design.
Within the time constraints, (the collaborative activity runs forty minutes on average), teachers have to decide whether to have students go in-depth with one material or study broadly for several examples. Either decision will have its advantages if teachers and students can make use of time well to achieve the maximum of learning outcomes.
Another success of this workshop resulted from the presence of many experts. In addition to Alyssa O’Brien and Christine Alfano, we were lucky to have Eva Magnusson from the Orebro university to personally attend the workshop at Stanford. Generally, the numbers of Stanford students are larger than other cooperated school students. Thus, while encountering technical difficulties, Alyssa and Christine have to run back and forth to fix problems. But this time, we had four experts including John Peterson to help out students’ difficulties. Because of sufficient personnel power, they not only fixed problems, but also taught students how to handle them next time. This breakthrough was truly significant because students should be able to master technology someday so that they can be capable of delivering this learning experience to peers or even next generations.
Posted by: Evelyn (Tsuei Ping) Kung | February 29, 2008 05:40 PM