25.1: Introduction

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Learning outcomes

After reading this chapter, you should be able to use important online tools such as digital stories, blogs, and wikis to:

Develop learners’ online identities and communicative abilities.
Engage learners with course content and with their peers.
Develop online learner communities.
Vary modes of participation.

You should also be aware of theoretical and practical issues surrounding these tools, and collaborative and collective online and blended endeavours.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” (Suzuki, 2006, p. 21)

In Zen Buddhism, there is a notion of beginner's mind (shoshin in Japanese), in which a person seeking enlightenment is asked to look at things as they are, without preconceived notions. A goal of looking at things from learners' perspectives is to see things the way new students do, and to anticipate problems and bottlenecks that they might face, a task that takes on added significance in light of the relative newness of online education. Online education acts as a universal solvent, dissolving many of the notions and axioms that we have taken for granted. Lynn Kirkland Harvey’s observations about online identities (Chapter 29, Identity in Online Education) are important to keep in mind because the theme of online identity is one to which we often refer.

This chapter includes two sections on relatively new technologies—blogs and wikis—not only to introduce the possibilities of creating sets of many-to-many relations within classes, and potentially outside classes as well, but also to encourage educators to use blogs and wikis in their classrooms as a way of returning to a state of beginner’s mind. These tools are not only powerful in themselves but may have an even greater potential when used together.

Joseph Tomei and Richard Lavin's section on blogs in this chapter argues that they may be the best (if such a claim makes any sense), all-round tool for computer-mediated communication (CMC). They are an ideal tool for helping learners (and educators) get their feet wet with online learning, and, revisiting Harvey’s theme, they allow learners and educators alike to build their online identity in a semi-enclosed space from which they can venture out on their own terms to engage with others.

Lavin & Tomei’s section on wikis points to some of the possibilities of these powerful tools for collaboration and some of the issues associated with them. They argue that, in general, wikis work better when learners already have a solid foundation in blogging. They mention recent work that attempts to merge the functions of blogs and wikis. Also in this section is a discussion of usability and flow. These concepts come to the fore with tools like wikis that are unfamiliar or can sometimes be difficult to grasp.

We then move to digital storytelling. David Brear walks educators through the process of planning and creating their own stories, preparing them to teach their students how to do the same. In the process, he takes one of the oldest urges of humankind and places it firmly in the technological present. The process of assembling various media and pieces of information into a story encourages deep learner engagement and can be a wonderfully effective way to master curricular content, while helping encourage a computer literacy that is becoming more and more important. David’s guide also provides a fitting introduction to another of the underlying themes of this chapter, that of narrative structure, revisited especially in the sections on blogs.