RoP Online – Meeting 5

Posted by: Lynn Tran

We transitioned into objects and design in this meeting. The pace of these latter meetings are slower. It is a combination of the content to be explored and responding to participants’ needs.

Role plays to examine how we facilitate conversations and feature our objects

• Three skits were featured. Each exaggerated in-person, educator facilitated conversations based on different teaching purposes — Giving Information, Checking for Understanding, and Express Your Thoughts. In each skit, there is an educator and two visitors at a touch cart to explore the pelt of a sea otter.
• Typically, in-person we would have volunteers use scripts to play the three roles. Audience participation in reading the skits adds lightness and humor to the experience, especially when participants see aspects of themselves portrayed in the skits. But time tends to melt away online during actions as minor as casting roles. We had to remind ourselves of the purposes for this task: learning how to make close observations and discussing the limitations and potentials of each conversation to support learning.  That focus led to opting for participants to watch pre-recorded skits on their own and collect observation data to address several observation questions. 

Critiquing objects

• The Let’s Talk Practice this week offered everyone a chance to have deeper conversations with peers and practice the basic structure of the Protocol for Video Reflection (more on this next week).
• Time continues to be the obstacle when we want to give learners substantive time to think and engage in conversations. All conversations are whole-group conversations, with little ability to have side chatter. Participants are quite skilled with using the chat box to react and respond to a flowing whole-group conversation. It would be nice if that function had more features to promote interactions between participants, such as  interfacing with the gallery view of videos, being able to signify someone (@someone) when chatting to everyone. 

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