This term I did a little experiment with some readings on contemporary networked warfare and learning in my HI2007, War, State and Society option. I staged the discussion in the first week to see if different sequences of readings might produce different discussions. It didn’t, but it was an interesting week.
Hi2007 is a second year undergraduate option. Titled “War, State & Society since 1450”, it is the introductory survey course in military history. It is open to history and politics students, and attracts between 40 and 80 students each year, usually fairly evenly divided between history and politics. In 2013, for the first time, it was being fully assessed by continuous assessment rather than by mid-term and exam.
Since I blend online and in class discussion as a matter of course, I decided to experiment with the readings in the first week. I took two readings on the nature of contemporary warfare, and two on online learning. i have used the contemporary warfare readings previously – they are T.X. Hammes on The Evolution of War: The Fourth Generation from the Marine Corps Gazette, September 1994 and John Arquilla’s From Blitzkrieg to Bitskrieg: The Military Encounter with Computersfrom Communications of the ACM, October 2011, Vol. 54, no. 10. Alongside those, I lined up two readings on contemporary online learning – Online Collaboration Principles by D Randy Garrison, which seemed a good entry point to his extensive work on eLearning, and a short piece by Tamra Excell, Preparing Students For The Future from Seen Magazine, 2010.
I divided the class into 6 groups, randomly, based on the class list. Now university class lists are a thing of mystery – mine rarely match the people actually in my class. There are alway more people on the list than there are in the class, and people in the class not on the list. This is accepted as a matter of course in my university; we deal with it, and since what really matters is the Exams office list at the end of term, errors at the start don’t matter – unless you are in the group full of non-people!
The six groups all got the same four readings, with the same reading prompts on each article, but in different combinations. So Group 1 got Hammes and Arquilla first, and then Excell and Garrison, Group 2 got Hammes and Excell first, and then Arquilla and Garrison, and Group 3 got Excell and Garrison first, and then Hammes and Arquilla. Groups 4, 5 and 6 got the same sequence, but with an extra reading prompt which asked them to explicitly suggest how we might shape the course to link netwar and netlearning. After Week 1, when we met face to face and discussed the articles, I explained the whole thing to the class.
As an experiment it produced a null result – there were differences between the group’s online discussions, but none which were clearly attributable to the sequence of readings. Where there were differences between groups, I think they were largely a result of whom was in the group, who was alert enough to engage with the readings in week 1 (c’mon, work, in week one of term after Christmas? ). if one thing didn’t work, it was mixing pairs of articles on netwar and netlearning – in the middle groups, people read the war articles, and mostly skipped the elearning articles. In the war articles, people across all the groups preferred Hammes to Arquilla – the Arquilla piece tries to balance two sides of the netwar argument whereas Hammes laid out one line of argument, with 3 clear real world examples which were popular. Students understood that Arquilla was arguing two sides of a coin, but some didn’t warm to it in the same way as they responded to Hammes, whose argument they clearly grasped.
Of the eLearning articles, Garrison is clearly longer and more complex than the Excell piece – I deliberately picked a hard and a softer piece. Nonetheless, students grasped both, warmed to the advocacy in the Excell piece, but still got the key points from Garrison. In that week, just under half of the discussion forum posts (15 out of 38) were on the elearning articles, and most were in favour of pushing for new modes of course organisation and delivery, and critical of old school lectures and exams. A trend among them was support for some sort of blended approach, with some arguing that a varied approach was best to allow for different styles of student learning, and some pointing out that a radical transformation might be too much in one leap. The students expressed strong support for what Garrison calls “social presence” as a key part of blended learning
So there is clearly an appetite among undergrads in at least one Irish university for change in how we do things, and a clear ability to grasp arguments about technology enhanced learning and form clear and sensible views about it. “Flipping the class” requires giving up a measure of control, and academic colleagues often argue against that, but it seems to me that our undergrads, when provided with new challenges, are better equipped to rise to them than academics might think.
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