Sentences About

We start with an activity called Sentences About.

In this phase, the facilitator or subject matter expert puts out something that looks sort of like notes from lecture. Embedded in the notes are links to pages that don't exist yet.

You are asked to take at least one of the links, do some research, and write a short page on it. It doesn't have to be a long page. It can be mostly a summary from Wikipedia if you want. Or it can be something much more detailed.

You can also edit the notes. If the notes say hypertext goes back to Vannevar Bush and you want to say it goes back to Otlet or Borges, then fork it, and add a sentence to it that some trace hypertext back to Otlet or Borges, link that and write that up.

You can do as many articles as you like. You may want to load up a neighborhood though, to see what other people have done. It's OK to duplicate work, but your preference may be to fill in gaps. And of course you can improve someone else's page instead of starting from scratch.

Read other people's articles, and if you don't understand any of the main notes, make sure you understand them before moving on.

The point of Sentences About is to build and consolidate some common background for participants. It is often centered around examples and basics of the topic. Creating these articles now allows them to be used in higher order conversations later.

In both T&L 521 and David Wiley's Open Education course, the Sentences About portion was executed as a Structured Notes activity -- students would listen to a short lecture, watch a video, or read a reading, and produce the notes, then expand out from there.

We're trying something different here, but the note-taking form is neat in the way that it plugs into traditional classroom practice while at the same time subverting it.