This self-evaluation will include the following parts: The On Ramp, the
proposal, the delivery, assignments, andragogy, other learner's reactions,
my own overall evaluation, and a recommendation.
The On Ramp
Anthony Curtis announced this peer day around the beginning of December.
At that time I had not decided to get full access to the Internet, but the
promise of this peer day, curiosity, and my life partner's growing interest
in using it for her book research tilted the decision towards signing up
for the class and getting full access.
We (my partner and I) went past America Online and other intermediate service
providers in favor of direct access. We settled on getting full access with
unlimited time because the fewer the restrictions and worries about time
we felt the freer we would be in our Internet use. We purchased the Internet
Starter Kit for Macintosh by Adam Engst and I downloaded from my local Mac
User Group's bulletin board the needed start-up software.
Just before Christmas we called the provider and before New Year's we were
fully up and running. The instructions in Engst's book, in conjunction with
telephone support from the provider and a couple of questions to the "Mentors"
on the bulletin board made the beginning easy. We used the month of January
to become familiar with the Netscape browser and different "search
engines" or Internet programs for searching Internet sites.
The Proposal
Learner Anthony Curtis is the "Webmaster" at Salisbury State University
(SSU) and maintains that institution's Web pages. In his proposal he wrote:
Participants should be prepared to do real research on the World Wide Web.
The online explanations and presentations will be suitable for both beginning
and advanced Internet users. In addition to posted learning notes and group
discussions online, the convener will answer specific questions to help
individual learners.
The Delivery
Anthony, with the active support of the other learners in this peer day,
delivered well on the promises in the proposal. He had set up two conferences,
one he would use strictly for announcements and the other for us to hold
our discussions in.The announcements conference did not become open for
all of us to use until the fourth day. On the second day I suggested to
him that he post his notes in the the discussion conference instead of waiting
for the announcement conference problem to get fixed. This he did, and we
were able to use the notes.
The notes included definitions of many Internet terms, a list of assignments,
explanations of part of the Internet (such as WAIS, WWW, FTP, Gopher, etc.)
and even editing shortcuts for the Union's Wildcat BBS.
One useful part of Anthony's notes was a general approach to conducting
online research from a vague perception of a topic to writing a draft.
The Assignments
To his immense credit, Anthony kept the assignments simple. This gave us
lots of time to get lost, ask questions, try again, and feel successful
before another assignment came due. The assignments were:
Introduce ourselves
Share goals for online research
Group discussion of how to get started using Union's Web site
Group discussion of jumping off points from Union's Web site
Group discussion on doing research via Union's Web site
Concluding group discussion
The quiz and task assignments added a bit of fun to this peer day, and challenged
our skills. Nothing feels better than using a new skill successfully. Tony
asked us to:
Look at the Union home page and comment on it
Visit Tony's school's home page and find out the name of the "image
wrangler"
Find out the name of the President of E! Entertainment Television
Find out the subject of Dave Frary's home page
Find out how many Ph.D. degrees the president of Arizona State University
claims ASU grants.
Of course, as with any research, the correct answer is located in many different
places.
Turns out that I possessed the right heuristic for answering the quiz questions,
which proved useful, shortened my search time and reduced my frustration
level to nearly zero.
I presented this research question: how to get things done when no one is
in
charge? Often groups such as coalitions, task forces, commissions, and care
teams are given the mandate of working together without a clear structure
or procedures for getting a good start and avoiding wasted time and emotion.
How are people learning to deal with these situations?
I suggested in my discussion of my approach that useful topics to search
might be: alternative dispute resolution, conflict resolution, consensus,
mediation, face
work, coalitions and coalition building, anthropology, sociology, political
science, agonistics, trust building. Sources of information I suggested
included: National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution, National
Institute for Dispute
Resolution, the Carter Center in Atlanta, National conferences of mayors,
governors, etc., United Nations, State Department (diplomacy etc.). Looking
at this list now I can add the Project on Negotiations at Harvard and George
Mason University which has a strong program in conflict resolution.
One day I spent three hours using the following key words to search Web
sites:
negotiation
multilateral
mediation
mediation process
negotiation training