The following is posted from the forums for my personal preservation:
First, I checked the copyright date and was interested to find this was written 2000. A time long before the volcanic eruption that created SL. It is difficult for me to take the wayback machine and think of the community of inquiry prior to my experiences in MOODLE and SL, since I do not have much to base any prior knowledge. My Masters’ work was conducted in world, in the Grad Center, with regular face to face meetings. We had the benefit of synchronous and asynchronous, while interacting with one another during class and the connection of a real time instructor.
I will fast forward to Spring 2008, Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds. All three of the required elements, due to the avatars, the class meetings and the guidance of our instructor has being strongly in place. No we have not seen one another but i think we have a pretty good idea of the types of people we all are. Our voices speak in our forums and we can sense angst and uncertainty after difficult tasks. Conversely, we share successes. We have a group in our class actively collaborating on a final project which I hope, we all, can take advantage of using with our teachers for professional development. Jane has asked us all if we would be interested in collaborating with her to better her favs by writing brief descriptions of each of the island to make them easier for the users. We have offered assistance to one another and have developed a sense of collegiality.
I have read posts and had to extend my cognitive presence, I have experienced, “a sense of puzzlement, information exchange, connected ideas and applied new ones.”
The social presence of this world is incredible, if this is not a place to find, “emotion, risk-free expression, collaboration (who of us have not made a friend in-world who has helped us in a difficult situation). This is truly an envrionment where the social presence is rich and engaging.
The teaching presence, was it Jim who counted 500 posts. That is a pretty prolific number. Who has kept the pace, our instructor. She has, “deined and initated discussion topics, shared personal meaning and helped focus our discussion.” This, I am sure, has been a major challenge.
I have just come from a conference regarding technology integration using the many wonderful tools available to educators today. A professional development model was present 23 Things for the 21st Century. Essentially it is a professional development model that gives teachers 23 tasks to complete in 10 weeks to become adept in the world of Web 2.0. The modell is totally online and each student uses a blog to report on their successes and failures with the tasks. I found the idea of having 25 student and having to monitor 25 blogs daunting. It appear to me that for cognitive presence and social presence to exist, the teacher presence would be essential to the success of the online learning experience. The facilitator is key. In the words of Peggy Sheehy, ” A million computers cannot replace one good teacher.”
