Rick West

I speak Spanish after having spent a couple of years on an LDS mission in Ecuador, and I was talking to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago who also spoke Spanish. He is more of a quiet, private type of person, but he commented that he noticed he was much more outgoing in Spanish, almost like he was a different person. I have noticed this with other people who speak a different language, who seem to be louder, quieter, more reserved or more flamboyant, depending on which language they are speaking.

I’ve never been able to figure out why that is the case.

I was reminded of this strange linguistic phenomenon today after reading a Wired article by Tony Long. In the article, Long discusses how relationships have changed because of technology. Ironically, coming from a Wired writer, he doesn’t think this change is good. He argues that while we might communicate more because of modern technologies, the strength or depth of our interaction is less. He believes:

It’s a paradox of the technology that even as the world shrinks, our actual communication skills are eroding. Instant communication encourages superficiality in the way we talk to each other. That’s because we really aren’t talking to each other. You have to look a person in the eye and speak in order to be doing that.

He goes on to explain how face-to-face apologies seem more heart-felt that rapidly sent emails, which he feels “trivializes the act of contrition.” He also discusses some studies indicating that we spend most of our days using technology for many tasks, including to communicate.

At the end of the article, he refers to a study, which quotes a Yahoo executive reporting that mothers (yes, I know, this is WAY too far removed from the primary source) said that they communicates better with their teenagers through IM because that’s the only way they WILL communicate with their parents.

It’s almost like these mothers describe their teens as being different people when communicating through technology. Face-to-face, he won’t talk. But on IM they will.

Do we, like these teenagers, have different personalities when we are communicating with technology, rather than F2F? Like when my friend who acts differently when speaking Spanish, I act differently when I communicate online. I think I am bolder, more confident, wittier (I hope), but more critical (unfortunately). My wife and I love to IM and have our funniest, laugh-out-loud kinds of discussions through IM (she also is wittier online!). In fact, a friend of mine teased me when I said that my wife and I do a lot of our communicating through IM. We talk F2F too, of course, but some of our most enjoyable conversations have been through instant messaging.

And the best part is those wonderful conversations can be archived!

I’ve heard similar things happen when people participate in Second Life or MMOG online games—they take on a different personality from their “real” one. Why do we act differently online? I don’t know, but I think it’d be an interesting research agenda to try and find out!

Along a similar vein, Robert Putnam of Harvard recently spoke at BYU and discussed how social connections are in decline. But there’s a ray of hope: He said this has happened before, after the Industrial Revolution, and people found new ways of forming connections. He encouraged the BYU students to create new methods for connecting to others in our modern society.

And what better way to do THAT than through technology?

The BBC has a fun little timeline showing the development of the Internet since it was “founded” 15 years ago. You can’t talk about web-based distance learning without talking about the development of web technology, of course, so I thought posting this link would be appropriate.

Looking back, I can’t believe it’s been 15 years. The Internet is so ubiquitous now that it is hard to believe. Was Bill Clinton really the first president to create whitehouse.gov? Is Amazon really only 10 years old? It’s still in its infancy as a company! A shocker for me was that the term “weblog” or blog is older than Google, and has been around for 9 of the Internet’s 15 years. So, technically, all of this blog chatter about blogs being a “new technology” is not really true.

Or maybe it is. Nine years is not much. Neither is 15 years. Technically the Internet is still a new technology.

On a personal note, I remember as an intern at the Idaho Falls Post Register trying to access text-only Internet pages back in 1996. It was slow as tar, and all I wanted was a few misely baseball scores, but it was still worth waiting those long minutes for those scores to come up, rather than wait for the AP to send the scores.

Then, I remember getting back from my LDS mission in 1998 and found out the Internet had exploded in two years. Everyone was using something called “email” and I needed help to set up my first Yahoo! email account … an account I still use today (can’t wait for Yahoo!’s new email service to be refined a little more, looks great).

Wow! I can’t believe that was 8 years ago.

Turning the attention towards web-based learning, that means we’re still in our infancy in teaching people online. We know there’s been a lot of discouraging online instruction that has been happening, but a lot of good models too. Hopefully we can now begin to refine the pedagogical methods and models, develop some standards, and create online instruction that truly provides quality education anytime, anywhere.

technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, BlogTracks

Blogged with Flock

When we originally read the CFP for the BlogTracks style of presentation, it appeared that the point was to blog about the AECT conference itself, during or after sessions we attend, so that there was an online component to the conference. This way, interesting discussions could be continued online after the 30-minute bell rings to close a face-to-face session. Also, it would allow AECT members not attending the conference to still learn what was being presented, and be able to participate and offer feedback. We would then present the last day of the week, to kind of “wrap-up” the online discussions and have a conclusion.

This really is a great idea, one that I believe could work. It would make the face-to-face sessions more of a discussion rather than a “sit, hear, and go away” kind of routine. It also removes the restriction that you can only participate in the convention by being “on campus.”

Because the BlogTracks was meant to happen during AECT’s convention, it was not a requirement to begin blogging early. We started blogging early just because we felt it would be good to get some momentum moving into the conference, and because we had been working on some writing projects that gave us something to start talking about.

Because the BlogTracks presentation was meant to primarily be an AECT convention thing, we were dismayed, then, to find out that we are scheduled to do our presentation on Thursday morning, barely into the second day of the conference. This must have been a simple mistake, and granted, the BlogTracks presentations are in their first year and no doubt will have growing pains. It’s still disappointing, however!

Now we really don’t know what to present about. We won’t have the opportunity to blog about much of the conference, so now we will need to present about what we blogged pre-conference. But that is awkward because we had felt that blogging before the conference was optional, not necessary. So we don’t have a whole lot written yet on some of our blogs.

So, if anyone is out there reading along, what should we do? This is as much your presentation (as an AECT community) as ours. What would you like us to present on? We could summarize some of our own research about distance learning, which seems too self-centered. We could try to summarize what we might learn that first day of the conference, but I doubt there will be much conversation going on by that point. We could talk about the experience of doing a BlogTracks presentation, but so far that experience has not been the best, and I don’t want to cast a dark shadow on what could possibly be a successful presentation medium.

So what do y’all think? What should we present on?

If someone IS out there reading, what would be the best idea, I think, is if some of you could join the conversation by responding to some of the posts that we have put up, even if they are from a few weeks back in the archives. If we could get some kind of discussion going now, then we could present about this online discussion. And that was really the point of this BlogTracks all along: To generate discussion among the AECT members, if possible, and report on how well that worked. So far, the blogs have been pretty self-centered, reporting only about the research we have done, simply because there’s nobody else to talk to yet.

Anyway, I’ll continue posting regardless of who does or does not pick up the discussion thread. Up next time, some thoughts about what the literature says about metacognition in distance education. It’d be great to have you along for the discussion!

technorati tags:BlogTracks, AECt, AECT2006

Blogged with Flock

I have been remembering lately about a research methodology I learned about once called social network analysis (SNA), which is a popular form of analysis in sociology, organizational development, and other fields. This type of analysis involves using statistical methods, matrices, and graphs to show how “connected” different folks are and how strong those connections are.

To learn a little bit about this type of research, I would either check out the Wikipedia article, or this website from management consultant Valdis Krebs.

It doesn’t seem like I have read very much about social network analysis in the study of distance learning, which seems a little odd because it seems like it could be appropriate for answering SOME questions (not the panacea research method, of course, but useful for what it can do and maybe in conjunction with other methods). Has anyone read about or have any experience with SNA in distance learning? I’m particularly interested in whether Janette or Frankie have heard about this method being used in your unique areas of expertise, since it seems it would be more applicable there.

technorati tags:blogtracks, AECT, AECT2006, social, network, analysis, distance, learning

Blogged with Flock

Occasionally, Fox Trot by Bill Amend is just great. Today’s comic shows the braniac young man trying to score extra credit by building the best school website. He spends all his effort using every cool script, style, and computer code, without giving any thought to the actual design of what the website will do or be like.

http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2006/09/19/

Sounds like a lot of distance learning technologies, doesn’t it? All about bells and whistles and what sells, and no thought about what people will actually learn. We can do better! Hire me when I graduate an instructional designer!

technorati tags:Fox, Trot, instructional, design, usability, distance, learning

Blogged with Flock

I referred in an earlier post about some research I have done on course management systems in higher education. I just received word that an article I wrote with some colleagues about this research that is being published by Educational Technology Research and Development is now available online in preparation for its release in print. To read it, go to:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/a11483w303084771/

The following is the abstract:

In this study, we used qualitative methods to help us better understand the experiences of instructors as they are persuaded to adopt a course management system and integrate it into their teaching. We discuss several patterns explaining how instructors implemented Blackboard, a CMS, by experimenting with individual features, facing both technical and integration challenges, and attempting to adapt Blackboard features to match their goals and practices.We also give explanations for why instructors either (a) embraced the tool and grew more dependent on it, (b) reduced their use of the tool to only some features, or (c) discontinued the tool and actively sought replacement options. In this paper we explain why instructors fell into any one of these three areas and what implications this may have for training and support needs.

technorati tags:BlogTracks, AECt, AECT2006, CMS, course, management, systems, Blackboard, WebCT, distance, learning

Blogged with Flock

To continue my theme of late in looking at the research about cognitive demands in distance education, I will conclude with my assessment that there is a decent amount of research done about extraneous cognitive load in DE (the CL related to instructional style, design, or method), and a small but growing bit of research about germane cognitive load in DE (the CL related to schema making–the “good” CL). However, there is almost nothing about intrinsic cognitive load in DE. Intrinsic cognitive load is the cognitive load inherent in the material to be learned. For example, no matter how effective your teaching methods, there will be some cognitive load involved in learning Quantum Physics, because there is cognitive load related to that subject matter, regardless of the instructional design.

In our chapter for the upcoming new edition of the Handbook of Distance Education, we (Hannafin, Hill, Song and myself) discuss this lack of research related to intrinsic cognitive load in DE. In preparing for that chapter, I found that information literacy research has a few studies that could be relevant. For example, Jones, Ravid, and Rafaeli (2004) reported a trend towards high intrinsic load in informal online spaces. They based this finding on an analysis of more than 2.65 million postings in over 600 Usenet newsgroups over a six month period. They found that the higher the intrinsic load in this online material, the less the users participated. I know this finding seems kind of obvious, but still interesting because if true, then this could be one reason why DE has such a high attrition rate. Maybe there is some material that has too high of an intrinsic load to even be appropriate for DE. This could raise some questions:

1. Is intrinsic cognitive load more of a predictor of attrition in DE than in traditional education?

2. How much can good design compensate for high intrinsic cognitive load in DE?

3. How can you measure the intrinsic load presented by a particular set of material to be learned?

4. Does the community influence the ability of folks to handle higher intrinsic cognitive load? Can a well-supported online community keep participation high in these tougher subjects? Is promoting community learning perhaps, then, more critical for difficult subjects to be learned?

5. How do varying levels of expertise impact intrinsic load in DE? Could this have potential for adaptive learning in DE? (Federico, 1999).

As always, interested in your thoughts!

References

Federico, P.-A. (1999). Hypermedia environments and adaptive instruction. Computers in Human Behavior, 15(6), 65392-65392.

Hannafin, M. J., Hill, J. R., Song, L., & West, R. E. (in press). Cognitive Perspectives on Technology-Enhanced Distance Learning Environments. To be included in the next edition of the Handbook of Distance Education, edited by Michael Moore.

Jones, Q., Ravid, G., & Rafaeli, S. (2004). Information overload and the message dynamics of online interaction spaces: A theoretical model and empirical exploration. Information Systems Research, 15(2), 194-210.

To be fair, I should mention that there is very little research done

technorati tags:BlogTracks, AECT2006, AECT, distance, education, handbook, cognitive, demands, intrinsic

Blogged with Flock

Sheesh! Another reason to dissuade you from blogging is when you have to try 17 times to get your post to show up, and then find out that it had been posting all along! I’ll never trust Flock’s “unable to connect to server” baloney again!

Sorry if anybody got all 17 copies of the last insignificant post in their news readers before I got a chance to delete them!

I like blogging, and I think it can be a useful thing for educators,
professionals, and students. However, I must admit I got a few chuckles
from this WikiHow article on “How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger.”

Enjoy!

technorati tags:blogs, blog, blogging

Blogged with Flock

Janette posted today about her developing interest in how people connect in online settings. That was great to learn about, because I didn’t know what it was that had gotten her interested in this research.

She discusses how many argue that people feel less connected when learning online, but that her personal experience has been the opposite. At the end of her post, she asks the following question:

do you feel more or less connected to others in an online space?

Presence & Connections » why am I interested in “presence?”

I think that’s a really good question. My experience has been much like Janette’s in that I feel MORE connected online. One of my friends thought it was really weird that my wife often use instant messenger to “talk.” We communicate in traditional ways too of course but the point is that we enjoy using IM and we feel we connect and communicate well online. I’m also much more connected and in touch with those of my friends and family members who use IM, blogs, online photo services, and other tools. At least, I FEEL that way.

There was another post circulating around the internet recently about this topic. Posted on the Tasty Research blog (nice name — but who are you?), this person reports on two research studies by the same lead author (Kraut), one in 1998 and one in 2002. (Forgive the secondary source citing here. I just read Tasty Researcher’s post and hope to download these articles and give them a proper read through). According to the Tasty Researcher, Kraut reports different findings in each paper. In 1998, he found that people were more disconnected online. In 2002, he found the opposite. What gives? First of all, we would need more research to verify that things really have changed. But if they have, it’s fun to think why it is so. Tasty Researcher offers a few ideas:

So what accounts for the difference between the 1998 and the 2002 study?

One could argue that the Internet has changed. Online dating, discussion boards, social networking, instant messaging. It’s just a different Internet.

The other argument one can make is that the users have changed — when the first study was done, only about the third of the population had access to the Internet. Now, everyone’s online.

Does the Internet improve social relationships and psychological well-being? « Tasty Research

What are your ideas?

References

Kraut, R., Kiesler, S., Boneva, B., Cummings, J., Helgeson, V., & Crawford, A. (2002). Internet paradox revisited. Journal of Social Issues, 58(1), 49-74. [PDF]

Kraut, R., Patterson, M., Lundmark, V., Kiesler, S., Mukopadhyay,
T., & Scherlis, W. (1998). Internet Paradox: A Social Technology
That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being? American Psychologist, 53(9), 1017-1031.

technorati tags:AECT, AECT2006, BlogTracks, BlogTracks2006, Internet, paradox, social, connections, online, distance, education

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