Questions about questions: another visit to iFontys

First of all, it’s been awhile since my last post. But as you can imagine, with the holidays and getting up and started again in the new year, blogs sometimes are the first thing to go.

So what has happened in the meantime? I made some big decisions for my graduation:

• A focus on asking questions and giving answers, to capitalize on the fact that those two are the biggest drive for collaboration.
• The tool will be designed with the facilitation of a Community of Practice in mind.
• I will focus my design specifically on the Fontys PABO Eindhoven students.

I will expand on the last two in other posts, but for now, I want to write about my last trip to Fontys students. But, it’s quite a read, so I’ll summarize what I learned for my design first.

• A lot of questions, the most important ones even, are about experiences. The questions and answers still stand, but this deserves some special attention later in my design.
• Content is still a very valuable resource to have in the design, especially when looking at the reading material students have. Being able to link this material to questions and answers might create some good discussion about it.
• The PABO is currently employing Learning Communities, which is very much related to the Communities of Practice that I want to encourage. Since the PABO LC appears to be largely built around meeting, I can fit my design around an online extension of this.

Questions and answers

I have written about spontaneous collaboration in a previous post. Since then I noticed that the most basic and prevalent form of spontaneous collaboration is asking questions and answering them. Nearly all collaboration boils down to those two mechanics; “I’m stuck here, how do you solve this?”, “Hey, what do you think of this drawing I made?”, “Want to give me a hand lifting this big log?”
Even relating an experience without a question in it can be an implicit request for opinions on the matter. Certainly the one sharing the experience should be open for that.

So with that mechanic of asking questions and answering questions in mind, I asked the iFontys PABO students to fill in a questionnaire. The goal of the questionnaire was to get a grasp on their normal schedules and activities and to see how they handle having questions and getting the answers to them.
What I discovered is that most of their questions are directed towards their colleagues; the questions usually relate to problems in their practical experiences and they seek out people that have had the same problems. Teachers and mentors are used as secondary sources (except when they can deal with them directly) and internet serves as a good tertiary source.

My visit to Fontys PABO Eindhoven

So I know what they do with questions and where they seek their answers. However, when do they actually have questions? This was the topic of my discussion with the students last Thursday. The discussion itself wasn’t as structured as I would have liked it to be, but it still gave very nice results. To get things somewhat more clear in my head, I asked what type of things they learn while in class. Interestingly enough, they couldn’t explain what they’re actually taught. Or in their words:

“How awful. We can’t even explain what we learn here. Hahaha.”

However, this made a lot of sense. At the PABO they aren’t taught a lot of theory, they’re taught how to apply the theory in practice and how to teach the knowledge they already have. So most of the classes are cover theory sparsely and instead elaborate on examples, anecdotes and other best practices. In other words, experiences are what count in classes. The reading material here mostly consists of articles and excerpts, which sadly appear to be less read than teachers would like.

Of course there is still actual theory that has to be plowed through. This mostly comes in the form assignments based on a theme. Students are expected to read material on a certain theme (for example ‘Children with ADHD’), create a ‘product’ (an assignment that varies per theme) around it and do a test. Most of the books students have to read, come into play here.

Finally, you have the internships. Students are put in front of actual classes and, under supervision of their school mentor, teach the kids about a subject. Their mentor helps out, gives them pointers and critiques the student’s performance. Internships are further discussed with their PABO mentor and in Learning Communities. More on those later.

All of the above serves to fill the student portfolio, which is a collection of the skills they have acquired. This is their main method of showing their progress and being able to advance between years.

Their questions

If you look at the type of questions that the students have, you start to notice that most of their more important questions gravitate around experiences. Since their education is centered around teaching children things that you already know from primary school yourself, the study can focus on how to do that. And in this manner, students start having questions that focus on how others handled certain situations. They want to hear other people’s experiences, so they have options to choose from when deciding what to do next.

This is something that is crucial in the Learning Communities that the PABO employs. The LC consists of all the students have an internship under a certain PABO mentor, including also the mentor in question, their school mentors and other interested teachers. Like the name implies, the LC closely resembles the Communities of Practice that I want to encourage with my design. A main factor of these communities is however that they should be trusted by the student. It has to feel ‘safe’ to relate their experiences.

Another interesting tidbit is that they sometimes have questions at moment in which they have no direct access to colleagues or teacher/mentors, which are their main source for answers. In bed, just before sleeping, for example. Another one of these moments is when students have questions about the ‘products’ they have to finish. However, these questions are best asked to colleagues of the same year or to PABO mentors, both of which are in short supply at the school the student’s are teaching.

Personally, I think these moments are a great opportunity for a tablet application to provide an outlet for these questions.

last remark

Now that I have everything typed down, my visit to Fontys was fruitful. I have been able to validate my ideas for integrating study material in my design and been able to get a better grip on the questions that students encounter during their education. Especially the fact that these often concern experiences is important for me, since this might require a different design as opposed to normal questions and answers.

My thanks to Annemarie van den Broek and all the students that I met during my visit!

“question mark ?” photo courtesy of Leo Reynolds @Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
“Brainstorm session for the Learning Technologies Community of Practice” photo courtesy of sonson @ Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)