I am back on the "I Will Knot" website to refamiliarise myself with the knots that I was practicing before the assignment got in the way. It's amazing how much you quickly forget because you haven't been practicing to the point where it "sticks" or "clicks" into place. At the moment, I am practicing once with the knot with the aid of the step-by-step video and then a further three times without the aid of the video - the trick is to try and repeat this tomorrow without the aid of the video at all!

On the subject of the "I Will Knot" website, I mentioned to a colleague of mine who teaches Chemistry at my University and has just been appointed a Learning and Teaching Co-ordinator for my Faculty that I was doing this learning challenge as part of my MSc and showed her the website I was using. She was most impressed by it - NOT because it showed you how to tie knots in easy step-by-step videos BUT how the idea behind the easy step-by-step videos could be used to show a particular Science experiment / practical to a group of students.

This visual aspect to learning is indeed a powerful motivator, and if done properly it could instruct students better than just reading it out of a textbook.

The next website, "Ropers Knot Page", has slightly longer, but equally, pedestrian instructions with rather confusing looking illustrations that don't do anything to enlighten me as to what I am suppose to be doing. I am beginning to wonder if I have chosen an appropriate learning challenge - certainly the free resources I am using are not explaining themselves very well.

My next resource, "I Will Knot", is something of a revelation to me. It uses a mixture of short, sharp videos and short, but still, pedestrian instructions. But it is the videos that work for me. When it comes to something that involves a motor skill, I am someone who likes to be shown so that I can mimic and keep practicing that skill. In that sense I could be considered as a kinesthetic learner.

This also suggests to me that if you want someone to learn something online, the materials / resources you create will be dependent upon the task / skills / knowledge / information that you wish to convey to your students.

So, do you use drawings, photographs, videos, audio recordings or text to put across something that needs to be learnt? Should this resource be passive or interactive? Can the learner work in isolation or does this require a collaborative / community dimension?

Interesting questions indeed!

Interestingly, I have just read in Section 2 (B5) of the QAA (2004) "Code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education" that students should have:

"where appropriate, regular opportunities for inter-learner discussions about the programme, both to facilitate collaborative learning and to provide a basis for facilitating their participation in the quality assurance of the programme"

One of the other assessed pieces of work is the "Learning Challenge" which contributes about 20% of the overall mark. Some of the examples of a learning challenge included juggling three balls; performing a conjuring trick; origami; writing a computer program; or tying a complex knot. Given that my sense of balance and eye / hand co-ordination is shot to pieces, any notion of doing juggling or riding a unicycle was quickly dismissed as a bad idea. Having programmed in a variety of different computer languages over the past 20 years or so didn't fill me with any great sense of desire.

The combination of not being in the scouts and being a fan of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook" led to the appealing idea of trying to attempt to perform a range of knots that could have practical applications should I find myself inexplicably castaway upon an exotic island, a bit like the cast from "Lost".

Based upon Damien DeBarra's initial idea of using social bookmarking for the course, Hamish Macleod suggested that we could give Diigo a try. Unlike Delicious (which I use a lot), Diigo allows users to create public / private groups for people to collaboratively work in - sharing resources and research material. Diigo, also, has the ability to highlight and comment on pieces of text. So I created a list of bookmarks on Diigo to support by learning challenge with knots - the list goes by the unimaginative title of "Get Knotted".

So, I've got the guides and tutorials that I need to perform the difficult knot exercises; but I was lacking that one vital piece of apparatus - the rope! I dutifully went off to C and H Fabrics where I purchased myself about a metre's length of soft cord. This wasn't without incident either; the shop assistant gaved me such a funny look over my purchasing of this piece of cord. Heaven knows what went through her mind as she was serving me.

I now have everything I need for my 10 (more like 8 to 9) week learning challenge. I shall be using the blog to record my thoughts about the actual cognitive processes involved in tying a knot and the strategies that I have employed to try and master the exercises.

References

QAA, (2004). Code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education. QAA [online]. Available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/codeOfPractice/ [Accessed 23 September 2008]