Task 10 of the NIE course involves analyzing two online courses according to the activity theory. Activity theory involves activities which are divided into actions which are again divided into operations.
PLENK2010 - Public Learning Environments, Network and Knowledge course is a massive open online course, where anyone from around the world can take part. The course examines the learning that occurs as a result of interaction and participation in the distributed community. The students are not given a certain body of content of the course, that they should remember, instead they are provided many reading, listening or playing materials. From these they choose the materials interesting to them and give feedback on the materials on their personal blogs, Twitter, Moodle discussion or anywhere else in a shared online environment.
The materials for the course are given in The Daily's. The Daily keeps the course together and helps to keep the focus on certain topics. There are also online live discussions on Fridays and Wednesdays. The course is very intensive and demands a lot of time if the participants are taking it seriously and daily going through the materials.
When describing PLENK2010 course in the concept of activity theory, I would use Kari Kuuti's example of activities, actions and operations.
Kari Kuuti's figure of activity theory:
PLENK2010
- Activity - Participating and learning from PLENK2010 course
- Actions - Going through the materials, participating in live course discussions and forum discussions, writing blog posts, reading other's blog posts, posting course related posts in Twitter and other environments.
- Operations - Choosing the blogging environment, choosing the materials of interest, registering to the course related environments, setting up personal profiles in different online environments etc.
New Interactive Environments is an online course which takes place in the fall semester in Tallinn University. NIE does not have a certain schedule of assignments nor body of content. The tasks and live online meetings are scheduled quite unpredictably, but are working kind of as a cumulative assignments, which should gradually bring the participants to the understanding of the course. The main goal of the course is to give a general overview of the interactivity, interactive environments and the theories of human actions and activities in these environments. The course involves keeping up with the course blog and doing the tasks and occasional live online meetings.
New Interactive Environments
- Activity - Learning about New Interactive Environments
- Actions - Keeping up with the course blog, doing the tasks, reading the feedback posts, getting familiar with the course related new environments
- Operations - Setting up an RSS feed to follow the new blog posts, providing personal blog address for the lecturers, visiting the suggested and tasks related web sites
If to compare the PLENK2010 and NIE courses, both have their pros and cons. Both of the courses have a broad field to cover and both are kind of experimental. While browsing through some of the blog posts of the participants of the PLENK2010 course I understood that they realized that the value of the course does not come immediately but through time. I guess it is the same for NIE course. Right now, being in the course, it seems general and has bites from here and there but the tasks to have some kind of cumulating value. I liked the organization of the PLENK2010 course better, since I work better intensively and when I am in full control of my time. But PLENK2010 has a very intensive schedule and it would be very time consuming to concentrate fully on completing the course. NIE does not have a comprehensive schedule and systemized tasks, which makes it difficult to see the big picture of what exactly are we trying to achieve.
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