TELTA Module (Week 2)
The following is a selection of my contributions to the group chat on Slack from from Wednesday 18th January to Tuesday 24th January 2017. The Slack ‘Chat Channel’ was set up by Dr. Frances Boylan on 10th January 2017 and I joined the channel on 11th January 2017.
17th January 2017
On Tuesday 17/01/17, I integrated my Twitter account with the DIT TELTA Slack channel.
18th January 2017
In the early hours of the morning, I sent the following message on Slack to Kevin O’Rourke, Frances Boylan and Pauline Rooney in relation to issues with Blackboard:
Gerard Kilkenny [2:38 AM]
Kevin, Frances, Pauline. I have spent over an hour trying to get ‘Chat’ and ‘Virtual Classroom’ (in Collaboration link for our group) working with Chrome, Firefox and Safari on my iMac in the group area on Blackboard. It seems to be a Java plug-ins issue. I downloaded and installed the latest version of Java. It comes up with ‘Loading…’ and / or Java exception errors. Previously, I have had no problem with accessing the Blackboard webinars using Chrome on my iMac. I’m going to bed to try to get that 4 hours sleep that Kevin referred to during yesterday’s webinar!
Terri Gray [8:14 AM]
Gerry sounds like you had lots of fun and at 2am!
Frances Boylan [9:20 AM]
@gerard.kilkenny We moved recently to an updated version of Collaborate but it would appear that the ‘lecture hall’ under the ‘collaboration’ group tool is trying to open the older version. That’s something we’ll have to report to Blackboard. I’m not sure why the chat isn’t working. For now I’ve disabled the lecture hall and chat functions in the groups. You’ve loads of other tools at your disposal to use to communicate so it should be ok. Feel free to set up a private slack channel for your group if you’d like. I think I allowed you those kinds of options in the settings but if not get back to me. I’m at a daylong seminar today but I could look at it after that for you.
Gerard Kilkenny [11:27 PM]
@frances Thanks very much for your reply. I have just set up a new private channel for our group (called group4). I was able to invite Rachel L to the group. However, Cora’s name does not appear in the list of students in our TELTA class so I can’t yet invite her to our (hopefully soon to be) three person group. This is because several names are missing from the list of all possible invitees. Only 10 names out of (the approx) 20 in our TELTA class appeared on the list. Cora’s name is one of the missing names. I don’t know why this is the case. Any ideas? (If I press the @ key, her name does appear here in this chat channel!) By the way, I began this message with @frances. What’s the purpose/effect of this? (I noticed some of our TELTA group do this and some don’t).
19th January 2017
Gerard Kilkenny [12:57 AM]
removed an integration from this channel: gerardkilkenny
Frances Boylan [6:48 AM]
@gerard.kilkenny: using @ flags your posting for someone in particular. This helps others filter postings & to easily recognise when a posting is referring back to a comment made by that other person earlier.
And Cora is on slack. If you type just ‘@’ a list of all those who have accepted my invite to slack should show up for you. You’ll see Cora’s name in there & can invite her to your group.
Gerard Kilkenny [9:36 AM]
@frances Thanks for the flagging explanation. However, I definitely could not invite her to the group though despite her being a member of Slack (which I knew using @). Cora and about 9 other Slack members were missing from the invited attendees list that appears during the invite process. I am certain of this.
Frances Boylan [10:20 AM]
@gerard.kilkenny I’ve checked the team members list and Cora is there as a full member. I was in touch with her by email about something else this morning and asked her to contact you.
Cora O’Donnell [10:20 AM]
Hi All, I seem to have had the same problem as Mary and a few other DIT staff. Using my Staff ID I could see everything (I think?) apart from my Group! I thought I had to read through all the material first before I was going to find out who was in the group!! Anyway resolved now! -So Rachel, Gerard, feel free to contact me.
Gerard Kilkenny [11:26 AM]
@cora: @rachellynch @frances Hi Cora, if you visit our group’s discussion board in Blackboard you will see a thread created by Rachel and responded to by me two nights ago. I have created a private channel in this Slack team called ‘group4’. Rachel was invited by me and is a member. I could not invite you as your name does not appear in the list of ‘invited attendees’ even though you are a member of this Slack team (20 members roughly) and a member of the Blackboard group 4 (3 members). I will login to the full Slack website shortly and see if your name will appear today in the ‘invited attendees’ list.
Cora O’Donnell [11:49 AM]
Hi Gerard, Yes, I responded to the discussion board thread created by Rachel.
Cora O’Donnell [11:54 AM]
@gerard.kilkenny @frances I do not see a private channell for Gp 4. I see three channells: twitter, announcements and chat. Frances, do you have any idea what the problem might be?
Frances Boylan [12:13 PM]
@cora & @gerard.kilkenny I’m not seeing the group either as I haven’t been invited to it so there’s little I can check out from this end. Lets see how Gerard gets on using slack via the browser later and go from there. He’s he’s still having problems then maybe add me as a member of the group and I can see then if as admin I can ad you to it too.
Gerard Kilkenny [4:20 PM]
@frances: @cora Slack functioned properly this afternoon allowing me to invite Cora to the group 4 private channel.
Frances Boylan [9:14 PM]
How is the group task going everyone? Any initial observations about participating in a collaborative task online and at a distance?
Gerard Kilkenny [9:32 PM]
Positives: (1) Learning more about different ways of using Slack. We have now set up a private Slack channel and all three of our group are communicating this way. (2) Set up a new Group Wiki in Blackboard to contribute our text. (3) Finding out that the Blackboard collaborative tools look very old-fashioned in comparison to Slack’s tools!
Gerard Kilkenny [9:40 PM]
Negatives: (1) DIT administrative error meant that one member of our group only got access to the group on Blackboard today. (2) A glitch in Slack meant that one member of our group could only access the private Slack channel for our group today. (3) As you said yourself, you will be reporting to the Blackboard folk that lecture hall and chat functions for the groups are not working. You have now disabled them. This means that the group has no webinar type collaborative tool to use within Blackboard (4) Consequently, the first two to three days have been spent test communication tools and trying to establish communication within our group.
Gerard Kilkenny [9:50 PM]
Suggestions: (1) Find out times that individuals within groups are free to work on tasks and try to form groups to correspond to individual time availability (2) Unless communication tools are working and ready to go, and groups have been organised around individual time availability, give 2 weeks for the task next year (3) For the webinar, disable the chat function. It does not sync well with the audio contributions from the lecturer and the students. (Two others in the TELTA group have said the same thing). (4) For the webinar, align it more closely with the materials the students create (i.e. the homework) during the week so that it has no focus. Last week, the webinar was ‘bouncing’ all around the place because of the text chat on the right hand side. Text chat with audio works when there is a small group of people and a longer webinar. In my opinion, it doesn’t work with 20 students and 3 lecturers in 1 hour. Now, back to being creative but not common…
Correction: “…so that it has focus.”
21st January 2017
Late that night, I sent the following message on Slack to Kevin O’Rourke, Frances Boylan and Pauline Rooney in relation to my conclusions regarding the task for Week 2:
Gerard Kilkenny [10:30 PM]
@frances @paulinerooney @kcor1964 Now that our group task is near an end, I have to say that the difficulties in working on an online collaborative project with Blackboard and Slack has been informative and a very good learning experience. I think that if everything had gone smoothly, the pitfalls and challenges of working with a group consisting of previously unknown individuals might not have been apparent. I feel that I learned quite a bit about copyright, licencing (including Creative Commons) and OER and for me, this reinforced previous learning of this material from the Instructional Design module of the MSc in Applied eLearning degree that I am currently pursuing. I have been one of the students who pointed out deficiencies and problems with the software and how Task 2 had been set up, and I made suggestions as to how things might be improved. I feel those reflections have been a part of my learning experience this week. Thanks to all three of you for creating the experience, for being available outside of webinar time and for being brave (or foolhardy?) enough to engage with 20 plus students questions, comments, gripes, etc. in an online forum. I’m sure that there was plenty of background work to do in setting things up and correcting problems in Blackboard. Feeling positive! :slightly_smiling_face:
22nd January 2017
Gerard Kilkenny [4:10 PM]
@frances @paulinerooney @kcor1964 “When this task has been done come back here and click the ‘Reviewed’ button to collect your week 2 badge!” This should be changed to ‘Mark Reviewed’ button as clicking on the ‘Reviewed’ button prompts Blackboard to warn you that this will mark your Group Task submission as ‘Unreviewed’. (The text is correct for the introductory video at the top of the page).
23rd January 2017
Pauline Rooney [10:48 AM]
@Gerry In relation to your point regarding the discussion boards…….there are different settings which you can select from when setting up a discussion board. Last week, Kevin decided to make it a requirement that you have to making a posting before you can view the postings of others. This week I left it at the “standard view” where you can simply view everything as it is posted (whether you have posted or not.)
Pauline Rooney [11:26 AM]
@Gerry I agree, the text “Mark reviewed” on the Blackboard badge is confusing. I’ve removed it and am going to award badges manually instead! In the webinar tomorrow we’ll cover how to view your badges as the module progresses.
Gerard Kilkenny [11:27 PM]
Check out the following Vimeo video which recreates the Ringelmann Effect. ‘Social loafing’ is the phrase used to describe the individual ‘slacking’ (no pun intended!), sliding and hiding that occurs when the individual members of a group are aware that they will be assessed as a group. Individual effort declines when there is no recognition of individual effort.
The Ringelmann Effect
In 1913, Max Ringelmann performed a simple experiment using German workers. He asked subjects to pull on a rope alone or in groups and measured the strain to demonstrate social loafing. This video recreates this experiment and talks about the theory.
Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What’s the Right Number?
When it comes to athletics, sports teams have a specific number of team players: A basketball team needs five, baseball nine, and soccer 11. But when it comes to the workplace, where teamwork is inc
Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What’s the Right Number?
I think that the piece above is worth a read. It’s not an academic paper but I think that it is a reasonable starting point to provoke some thought on the subject of group size.
Pat Zaidan [11:41 PM]
Interesting stuff Gerard!
Mick Mc Keever [11:50 PM]
Looks like it’s easier for 1 student to ‘ game’ the system with 4 in a group than 3 if you are that way inclined.
Gerard Kilkenny [11:55 PM]
Yes, Mick. There may be evidence to suggest that people feel that they can hide in a larger group. Here’s another piece to read:
The psychological theory that explains why you’re better off working solo
In 1913, a guy named Max Ringelmann noticed something strange about humans. Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, took a rope and asked individual people to pull on it.
Then he asked those same people to pull on the rope with a group. He observed that when people pulled with a group, they put in less effort than when pulling on their own.
We call it “the Ringelmann effect,” or social loafing. It describes the tendency for individual productivity to decrease as group size increases. And it doesn’t just happen in tug-of-war games: It’s present in companies like Google and Facebook more than a century after Ringelmann’s discovery.
https://qz.com/848267/the-ringelmann-effect-productivity-increases-when-youre-working-solo-rather-than-on-a-team/
From the above piece: “The Ringelmann effect appears beyond the workplace, too. It’s why you feel like you can clap more softly in a crowd. It’s why people don’t vote, because they think it won’t make a difference. It’s why dozens of people watched Kitty Genovese get murdered in New York in 1964, because everyone thought someone else was doing something about it.”
@kcor1964 Kevin, was it 3 or 4 hours sleep that you were recommending before webinars?
24th January 2017
Gerard Kilkenny [12:01 AM]
@mick_mc_keever Mick, I know that you’re probably still doing some late night research on group size. However, you really should consider the danger of not waking up in time for today’s webinar.
Pat Zaidan [12:03 AM]
There’s also a bit of ‘human nature’ in it! I don’t think that this is really anything new. Trust, and encouragement and playing nice goes a long way in group dynamics, in my opinion.
Gerard Kilkenny [12:08 AM]
That’s true too Pat. I thought there was a nice social dynamic to the online group that I was in. Everyone was very courteous.
Mick Mc Keever [12:09 AM]
Gerry – now we are Working as a group! I will be asleep 1-2 tomorrow but who will know?
Gerard Kilkenny [12:19 AM]
You must be using that new software ‘Slackinar’ as well Mick. It fools webinar presenters into believing that a student is actually ‘present’. The trial version allows you to set a timer and uses a macro to record the keystrokes to remotely access the webinar without the ‘participant’ having to leave their bed. The pro version causes the ‘hand’ to be raised randomly during the webinar as well as mimicking the ‘participant’s voice if called upon to make an erudite interjection.
Mick Mc Keever [12:23 AM]
No it’s called STELTAR
Kevin O’Rourke [9:08 AM]
:slightly_smiling_face:
Gerard Kilkenny
@kcor1964 Kevin, was it 3 or 4 hours sleep that you were recommending before webinars?
Posted in #chatJan 23rd, 2017
Pauline Rooney [9:12 AM]
@Gerry Nice to see that you are using your research skills and time productively to prepare for TELTA webinars :smiley:
