Present day digital technologies have changed the way we exchange information available on media. The transition from receiver of knowledge to an active participant in making and shaping the course information is developed online is possible due to modern day DTs. I remember watching TV and using Web (ver 1.0) where there was no control on the content. The only choice a receiver/user had was whether to watch it or not (i.e., Yes/No). Viewers were bound to watch or listen what ‘someone else’ had decided them to watch. It that set up, there was no room for setting of changing the course of proggrammes or information; not even to what you want to to have on that media.

With the invent of Web 2.0, it was possible to have users say in how the information is shared and preseted online. This all is possible due to comment or feedback mechanism. The blog like environments have also impacted teaching and learning. In a didactic model where teacher was the sole source of information, learners assumed the of passive receivers of knowledge. All LMSs available today offer discussion forums/updates/post feature which is open for comments. In this way, it is not possible to set the course of disicussion as per thoughts of one person. Its more and more democratic these days. The recursive feedback (feedback after feedback after feedback) helps incrementally improve one’s understanding of a certain idea/concept.

I tried this recurvsive feedback using Moodle where I set up a task where participants (teachers from various schools) were required to share a their schemes of works for a topic. I used the ‘Workshop’ feature of Moodle for this activity, on a local server. They were set in pairs/groups to review and comment on each others work in a constructive and constitutive manner. Teacher reviewed and commented; critiqued, and suggested in supportive manner. I found the following advantages and improvements in the work;

· Criteria was clarified incrementally as some teachers reviewed peers work;
· The outcome i.e., SOW for each, was seen to become a developing work;
· There was less pressure on me to provide feedback to all learners;
· Timely feedback was given to all;
· I as facilitator monitored the process and intervened where absolutely necessary.

The disadvantage was the some comments and feedback was not of a good quality and those teachers relied only or saying ‘Nice plan’, ‘good work’, etc as if the purpose was only to meet the requirement of commenting. This aspect was also addressed on a separate discussion on the same forum. In-spite of addressing the issue to quality of comments, I feel this is an areas which can hamper taking advantage of such media feature. More and more involvement will help, indeed.

Overall, the recursive feedback managed by modern day technology has a potential to engage more and more learners and all that with a ubiquitous way.

Interestingly, most of the comments and suggestion posted by ;erners on eachothers’ work was in present continuous tense, and a few were in past tense. (Kalantzis and Cope, 2015)

References

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2015). Learning and new media. In D. Scott and E. Hargreaves (Eds.), The sage handbook of learning (pp. 373-387). Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.