Rick West

I wanted to try and get this out yesterday, but had a busy, fun day! Too much fun stuff going on, and didn’t get around to filling out my notes. As it is, this is still largely in note form because I’m still thinking about what Mr. Couch said, and what it might mean for my work.

I like those ideas. They taste good. 

technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, apple, education, digital, native, change

Blogged with Flock

This is part 2 of my summary posts in preparation for the face-to-face BlogTracks presentation. In part 1, I summarized what I have blogged about in this space in the last couple of months. In this second part, I will discuss what I think might be some keys to enabling a successful BlogTracks presentation in the future.

A BlogTracks that focuses just on the blogger’s own research, and simply tries to communicate that blogger’s findings to a listening (or not) audience is basically a presentation that is not at all different from traditional paper presentations. In other words, it is lecture-based (albeit lecture through writing), is focused on a singular point of view, and does not engage the audience in a dialogue about the chosen issues. I think BlogTracks will be a successful conference format if we can make it different, substantially different, from the other kinds of presentations already available (posters, roundtables, paper presentations). Towards that goal, I have a few suggestions from this year’s experience:

1. Have defined goals that are discussion-based.
If a blogger is just blogging about what they would normally blog about, what distinguishes it as a special AECT presentation? I think a successful BlogTracks should have a defined goal and purpose to frame the discussion on that blog. We have tried to do that with our BlogTracks, and each of us has a related, but different, focus for our blogs. Our general theme is distance education literature review, but each of us is looking at a specific portion of the literature. I think this was very helpful for us, and would make it easier for other folks to understand what we are doing and how they could participate.

The second half of this point is that the BlogTracks goals or foci should be discussion-based. I am also participating in the other 2006 BlogTracks presentation, where we are blogging about our personal journey online in developing an online persona. I think this was a good idea and concept, but I think this Blogtrack struggled even more than the present one because we did not understand clearly what we were supposed to actually blog about, and it wasn’t a topic that necessarily encouraged discussion.

I think future successful BlogTracks should consider what issues would engage the most people in a discussion, and propose those as topics.

2.    Define your boundaries.
Our BlogTracks struggled in this area. In AECT’s original call for proposals, it appeared that the blogging would happen the week of the conference. We decided to start before the conference, but I don’t think we really agreed together on when the presentation would officially “start” and how much blogging we would do as part of each person’s “role.” I think AECT could help in this area by setting some time tables (maybe, the BlogTracks presentations will begin two weeks before the conference and continue throughout the week of the conference). This would help bloggers know the level of commitment expected. AECT could then help advertise the BlogTracks by giving a big kick of publicity when the BlogTracks officially start. As it happened this year, each of our bloggers on our team started blogging in earnest at different times. In the other BlogTracks it was the same, and we spent a long time wondering if we were supposed to get started yet, or not. These expectations once established by AECT, could be refined within each blogging team.

3.    Engage nontraditional conference participants.

The BlogTracks could be an excellent way to help people stay connected with AECT if they can’t attend the conference. To do this, I would recommend inviting bloggers from other professional organizations to participate on the blogging teams. We could gain a lot of insight into our topic if we had, perhaps, members of our team that was well entrenched at AACE, ASTD, and other organizations. It would have exposed them to our AECT community and exposed us to conceptions of distance education held by these other communities.

We should also try harder to engage AECT members who can’t attend the
conference. Perhaps by advertising heavily though the AECT website and
all the division listservs, and by blogging in a way that promotes
discussion and engagement in the dialogue, perhaps these folks would
participate in the discussion. I also think the BlogTracks could be a
form of connecting to the conference, and as such should be one of the
last presentations of the week, and the focus should be on blogging
about your topic throughout the week, connecting your thoughts to those
presentations you attend. In this way, people not attending the
conference can get second-hand reports of some of the presentations and
be able to respond and participate. In this situation, the BlogTracks
face-to-face presentation would also be a summary of sorts of emerging
themes throughout the week, an abstracted discussion of major
conference points. This could be a potentially very interesting
face-to-face session, and this would add to the prestige of the
BlogTracks format for the following year.

4. Tie BlogTracks to divisions

The challenge with any online conversation is you need a few folks to help get the dialogue going, before it can take off on its own. I propose that one way to do this for the BlogTracks is to  tie the BlogTracks to the divisions. This is how I think it could work. Each division could have one sponsored BlogTracks. They hold a call for proposals, review the proposals, and pick the blogging team they think best represents their interests. The bloggers commit to post a certain number of times, beginning a specified time before the conference. The division commits to have four or five folks–maybe the division leadership–subscribed to the blog who will engage in the dialogue. The division’s communication officer advertises the division’s sponsored BlogTracks heavily. Eventually, when the discussion takes off, the division no longer concerns itself with forcing the dialogue, but engages in the conversation as it wishes. Then, at the conference, the bloggers attend sessions for that division, and report on them for the members not at the convention.

I think this would be a wonderful thing for both BlogTracks presenters and divisions to meet both of their purposes of advertising and engaging AECT members!

As always, I am interested in your thoughts. Here’s a few questions I still have:

• When should the BlogTracks presentations begin? A month before the conference? Earlier? Later?
• How many bloggers should make up a team? Could one blogger be a BlogTracks by himself?
• How many divisions would benefit from and would support a sponsored BlogTracks presentation?
• What would improve the visibility of the BlogTracks?
• What would engage more people in the conversation?

technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, BlogTracks2006, BlogTracks, distance, learning

Blogged with Flock

Our face-to-face portion of the BlogTracks presentation will be tomorrow (Thursday) in the Pavilion room at 9:15 a.m. Come join us!

technorati tags:BlogTracks, AECT, AECT, AECT2006

Blogged with Flock

The time has come to give the face-to-face presentation of the activity on this blog as part of the AECT 2006 convention BlogTracks. And as far as the activity outside of my own writing, I can report that …

Nothing happened.

I understand, of course, that folks are busy, and what’s in it for them anyway to engage in the dialogue of this blog? So I am not at all offended. I’ve been blogging in relative obscurity for a couple of years now, content with the benefits I have received personally from writing.

But I am curious about how future BlogTracks presentations can be made more effective, since this is the first one. Like everybody else, I think sitting on my tail and being lectured to all day long at conferences is not very productive, so I applaud AECT for trying to innovate and introduce a new presentation format. Hopefully we can think of some methods for improving the engagement in future BlogTracks. To that end, in this post I will summarize what I have written about during this BlogTracks and my conclusions, and then in my next post I will consider some possible ways we could make future BlogTracks more effective.

Metacognition in TEDLEs

• The use of hyperlinking and repetition that is common in these environments provides cognitive cueing and supports metacognitive awareness
• BUT nonlinear environments require more cognitive load to mentally organize material, reducing metacognition.
• SO, metacognitive prompting is a helpful strategy.
• FUTURE QUESTIONS?: Whether, and in what ways, students are more or less prone to use metacognitive strategies in an information-overload, nonlinear Internet

Intrinsic Cognitive Load in TEDLEs

• Not very much done!
• We could learn from information literacy research.
       Example: Jones, Ravid, and Rafaeli (2004) reported a trend towards high intrinsic load in informal online spaces, causing less participation.
• Future questions
   Is ICL a predictor of attrition in DE?
   Can design compensate for high ICL in DE?
   How can you measure the ICL?
   Can a strong online community keep participation high in subjects with high ICL?

Extraneous Cognitive Load in TEDLEs

•  Limited prior knowledge of the technology used to facilitate the distance learning environment could lead to increased extrinsic load
• Web-based hyperlinking, in the absence of organizational guides, increased extraneous cognitive load associated with learning.
• FUTURE QUESTIONS?
   More replication of studies to verify results
   How can design improve material organization and lower ECL?

            How can we ease ECL with new technologies?

Germane Cognitive Load

•  Not very much done in online environments, although heavily researched by many IT and DL folks!
• We could learn from communications research on navigation and surfing patterns.
      Example: Eveland et al. (2004) reported participants learned factual information best from linear websites, but nonlinear sites improved knowledge structure density.
• NOW WHAT?
   How do you use standard GCL-building methods online?
   How are mental models constructed online?
   How do you measure GCL online?

Course Management Systems

•  Literature audit found 70+ research articles
• Most of these were one-shot, convenience studies
• Less than 10 were studies of more generalizable impacts
• But 95% of colleges and universities use CMS tools!
• Discussion Questions:
   Why isn’t more research conducted about CMS technologies?
   What kind of research should we be conducting about CMSs? What outcomes? What measures?
   Have we missed the opportunity to really see what happens from implementing a CMS because the tools are now ubiquitous?

Other Topics I’ve been discussing

•  What can we learn from popular social networking sites?
•  Are we different personalities online?
•  Social Network Analysis and DE
•  Can “cool” be created?
•  The Creative Digital Divide
•  Educating a global economy
• No family left behind
•  Digital natives
•  Sexy research

I’d love to have anyone discuss these ideas with me! There’s still time this week!

technorati tags:AECT, AECT2006, BlogTracks, distance, learning, education

Blogged with Flock

Online communities of learning do not work. This, at least, seems to be the message of many researchers who have studied online communities or computer-supported collaborative learning (Hewitt, 2005; Van der Meijden & Veenman, 2005, for example). However, online communities can, and do succeed in some situations. For example, sites such as Myspace.com, Friendster.com, Xanga.com, and Flickr.com rival or surpass Google in visitors. Reportedly, 54 million people use myspace.com to interact together, and similar sites are not too far behind (McPherson, 2006).

One research idea that I would like to investigate one day would be to study why social networking, interaction, and collaboration is so successful, particularly among young adults, with websites such as myspace.com, and yet not so popular in educational settings. My goal would be to better understand the aspects of these social sites that encourage so much participation, and define guidelines for developing educational social communities that employ the same principles, as much as possible. In short, can we engineer better educational online communities by copying ideas from informal and commercial communities? I know, I know, I have my doubts that learning and social connectedness can be engineered and “forced,” but isn’t that what we try to do as instructional designers? Design or engineer environments to allow for more effective learning?

I learned in Robert Alford’s Craft of Inquiry text about crafting theoretical questions (or general questions) and empirical questions (testable or researchable questions). If I were to do a project like this, I had thought that the following might be my questions:

Theoretical questions:

1. Can learning communities employ principles from popular social networking sites to improve educational collaboration and interaction?
2. Do the effectiveness of online learning communities aid in the development of expertise?

Empirical questions

1. How do relationships form in these online sites?
2. What draws people to associate and interact together through these online sites?
3. What are the affordances of these social environments that are lacking in educational communities?
4. What kinds of support or interaction do learning communities fail to provide to students?

How would I organize such a study? Which questions would be most important to research? What are your thoughts? I think it’d be a fun, and interesting project.

References
Hewitt, J. (2005). Toward an understanding of how threads die in asynchronous computer conferences. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(4), 567-589.

McPherson, K. (2006). Whose space is it, anyway? Mercury News. Accessed 13 Mar 2006 from http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/business/technology/13840568.htm.

Van der Meijden, H. & Veenman, S. (2005). Face-to-face versus computer-mediated communication in a primary school setting. Computers in Human Behavior, 21(5), 831-859.

I have been experimenting with Flock as my browser the last few months. There are some things I love, but it is still in an obvious, true beta form (as contrasted with other, unnamed, corporations who call things “beta” when they really are full-fledged applications!). If you haven’t seen Flock, it is a “Web 2.0″ browser that makes it SO easy to drop photos into your Flickr account, post to del.icio.us, or drop a quick blog post to any of your blogs. My favorite feature is the snippets feature, which allows you to drag and drop snippets of websites you visit so you can paste them into blog posts later on.

But the new reason why I love Flock is that it automatically saves copies of your blog posts. How cool is that? So a long time ago I wrote a post about the generations of distance education, and the browser crashed (yes, it is still beta). I never rewrote the post because I was frustrated over the lost effort. But lo and behold, I found a place on my hard drive where Flock had been saving my blog drafts! So, without further ado, I’ll share some ideas I’ve had on how to characterize the history of distance education.
Generations of Distance Education

For this group writing project (this BlogTracks, and a future article that we hope to write), I was asked to research the history of distance education, specifically technology-enhanced distance education. Before I really looked at the literature to see what other scholars have done to characterize the history of technology-enhanced DE, I came up with the following “eras” or “periods” of distance education:

Period 1: CBI/CAI. This was the precursor to Internet-based education, where distance education was mediated by computer-based means, such as CD-Roms. This type of DE tended to focus on bounded content with linear progression through the material (see Merrill, 1996). HyperCard was perhaps the flagship software used for designing this instruction, and was instrumental in opening up new avenues of student mobility in learning and control.
Period 2: Distance transmission. This was the period when we used the Internet to transmit learning materials back and forth. That was the extent of the interaction, and instruction was very similar to the CBI/CAI period except that the medium (the Internet) had changed. During this time, Clark (1994) argues that the medium does not influence learning. He’s right … because the medium hasn’t been used to change any of our teaching methods.

Period 3: Distance interaction. This is the period where computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) emerges as a theory and an instructional method, and emphasis is on creating virtual communities and collaborative spaces where learners can interact together.

Period 4: The emergence of CMS tools. Two course management giants, WebCT and Blackboard, explode in popularity. DE becomes more popular and accessible to different groups of instructors and learners who may not have web-authoring abilities. A few points about this period, which is the period we are in now:

• Now, with over 95% of colleges and universities using some form of e-learning system, (Pollack, 2003)
• Blackboard and WebCT, each being used now at over 2,000 different academic institutions (Pollack, 2003; Arnone, 2002). These two companies have now merged.
• Besides Blackboard and WebCT, there are several other CMS companies, including Desire2Learn, eCollege, and Jenzabar. There are also many open-source or freely distributed CMS products, such as the Manhattan Virtual Classroom Project, Sakai, OpenCourseWare (developed by Utah State University) and a popular open-source alternative called Moodle
• “CMSs have become mission critical systems for many institutions” (Young, 2002)

Period 5: Mobile Learning. This period has been emerging simultaneously with at least periods three and four, but I think this will become even more important in the near future. Chris Dede has explained this trend well in a couple of keynote presentations that he has given at the SITE and AECT conferences, where he described how we have had students going to virtual learning spaces (such as MOOs and MMOGs), but now more and more we have virtual reality coming to the students, and existing simultaneously with the students in the real world through mobile devices. So, for example, instead of students going to a virtual world such as Quest Atlantis, they will have the virtual learning quests on their palm pilots. They will be able to interact with the virtual world and virtual reality as they walk around, participate in, and interact with the real world.
I know I haven’t explained that very well … I need to reread some of Dede’s work, and then I can perhaps write a follow-up post explaining this better.

Period 6: The read/write web. This period is characterized by tools like Furl, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr, Writely, Google Spreadsheets, MySpace, wikis, blogs, and all the other quickly emerging social learning tools available on the Internet. This type of instruction has been championed by various educational bloggers, but is becoming more mainstream. It is typified by involving students in creating, sharing, and building knowledge bases as an e-learning community. I don’t think we really know what the implications will be of these tools on the future of learning.

Remember that this list was basically just the product of my own brainstorming, and hasn’t been refined yet. Since I created this list, I have read about Taylor’s (2001) characterization of “5 Generations of DE”, based on Nipper’s (1989) original list of three generations. Lou, Bernard, and Abrami (2006) also refer to Taylor’s characterizations of the history of DE. I like Taylor’s list, and think that since reading about it, I will re-write my descriptions of the history of DE.
But I’ll get to Taylor’s description of the history of DE in a later post. For right now, I’m open to any suggestions and feedback on my current description of this possible method for chunking the history of technology-enhanced DE into six periods or major patterns.
Questions for you!
I already think I’m missing one or two glaring trends that I need to add, so I admit up front that this is not yet very well developed. But what is your feedback?

References

Arnone, M. (2002). Course-management outfits still seek elusive profits. The Chronicle of Higher Education. July 12, 2002.
Clark, R.E. (1994). Media will never influence learning.Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 21–29.

Merrill Paul F., Hammons K., Bret R. Vincent. Reynolds P.L., Christensen L., Tolman M.. Computers in Education. 3rd Edition. Allyn and Beacon. 1995

Pollack, T. A. (2003). Using a course management system to improve instruction. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association of Small Computer Users in Education, held at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Young, J. (2002). Pricing shifts by Blackboard and WebCT cost some colleges much more. The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 19, 2002.

To continue reviewing some of the literature about cognitive aspects of technology-enhanced distance learning environments (TEDLEs), I will write briefly about some of the things I have learned about metacognition in TEDLEs. Once again, this builds off of some of my contributions to an upcoming chapter with Drs. Hannafin, Hill, and Song in the next edition of the Handbook of Distance Education.
Metacognition, of course, is our ability to be aware of what we are thinking and learning and to regulate this learning and processing. This is perhaps one of the most empowering ideas to be developed in learning cognition theories. I love the focus on learner agency—the idea that we can control our processing, our cognition, and our learning!
So is this metacognition easier or more challenging in TEDLEs? In computer-based learning, which is similar to some degree, some researchers believe the use of hyperlinking and repetition that is common in these environments provides cognitive cueing and supports metacognitive awareness “by prompting learners to reflect on their learning progress and allowing them to repeat material at critical junctures if needed” (Workman, 2004, p. 520).
Likewise, some researchers believe that TEDLEs can also provide more natural cognitive cueing, promoting more metacognition. To quote from our chapter, I reviewed one study by Zion, Michalsky, and Mevarech (2005) where they argue that:

“asynchronous learning networks (ALNs) allow students to review digital records of the learning that was constructed, enabling students to better monitor their learning and making cognition more visible while they develop metacognitive skills. The authors conducted a 2×2 experiment involving 407 Israeli 10th-grade microbiology students, and found that ALNmetacognitive scaffolding performed significantly better than those in the face-to-face group with no scaffolding. No significant differences were found between the ALN students with students without metacognition help and the face-to-face group with the scaffolding.”

I think this finding was interesting, because it may indicate that metacognition could be easier to achieve in TEDLEs, because the F2F group needed metacognitive support to achieve the same level as the online group who received no support, assumedly because with or without support, the students found it easier to perform metacognition online, and thus they performed better. However, I think that there are probably other variables at work here and other possible explanations, so this study would need to be replicated a few more times and in different contexts.

This is good news for online learning, except that the research is not conclusive. Other researchers have arged that developing good metacognition abilities may be difficult while learning online. For example, Schwartz, Anderson, Hong, Howard, and McGee (2004) suggested that because nonlinear online learning can be, well, nonlinear, that

“Individuals often fail to regulate meta-comprehension during online hypermedia learning because some mental resources must be used to interpret the organization of the material. In their study, they recruited 28 students between the ages of 9 and 17 to freely explore a science website in one of two formats: a conventional, linear outline format or a nonlinear format. Using the Junior Metacognitive Awareness Inventory and How I Study Questionnaire, they found that metacognitive skill was not a good predictor of retention for students using an outline structure, but it was for students using the nonlinear websites. So what do we learn from this? The authors concluded that metacognitive skills are necessary but not sufficient for learning from hypermedia, and that well-designed TEDLEs need to provide familiar structures and conventions to reduce metacognitive demands.”

That makes sense. If the learning is going to nonlinear and thus unfamiliar from “normal” linear learning, then we need to provide some structures for people to navigate the new learning landscapes.
A couple of other things we learned from some published studies, is that prompting learners to think about their learning periodically as they study can significantly improve learning online (Kaufman, 2004; Bannert, 2003); and that metacognitive knowledge in online learning can even make up some domain or system knowledge deficiency (Land & Greene, 2000).
So what are some possible overall takeaways from this? One, I think, for designers of online learning is that we should understand the importance of metacognition in online learning, particularly because online learning can be disorienting without metacognitive scaffolds. And then we should take advantage of the affordances of online learning to support metacognition, perhaps by emphasizing the ability to retrace one’s steps, see where one has been and is going in the learning, and being able to stop the explicit studying to reflect or repeat, and then return to where one was originally. Building in more reflective processes into online learning, making history and future apparent (through concepts such as “bread crumbs” or progress bars) can probably help.
As far as what questions still remain, I am not sure about what new questions we might need to ask (I’m open to ideas), but I think we could investigate further whether, and in what ways, students are more or less prone to use metacognitive strategies in an information-overload, nonlinear and nonorganized Internet. The learning landscape online is very different from traditional school-based learning, and I wonder whether that supports or challenges metacognition. I have quoted a few studies that talked about this, but there does not seem to be consensus on this issue yet.

References

Bannert, M. (2003). Effekete metakognitiver Lernhilfen auf den Wissenserwerb in vernetzten Lernumgebungen. German Journal of Educational Psychology, 17(1), 13-25. [English translation]

Kaufman, D. F. (2004). Self-regulated learning in web-based environments: Instructional tools designed to facilitate cognitive strategy use, metacognitive processing, and motivational beliefs. Journal of Educational Computing Research. 30(1 & 2): 139-161.

Land, S. M., & Greene, B. A. (2000). Project-based learning with the World Wide Web: A qualitative study of resource integration. Educational Technology Research and Development, 48(1), 45-67.

Schwartz, N. H., Andersen, C., Hong, N., Howard, B., & McGee, S. (2004). The influence of metacognitive skills on learners’ memory information in a hypermedia environment. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 31, 77-93.

Workman, M. (2004). Performance and perceived effectiveness in computer-based and computer-aided education: do cognitive styles make a difference? Computers in Human Behavior, 20(4), 517.

Zion, M., Michalsky, T., & Mevarech, Z. (2005). The effects of metacognitive instruction embedded within an asynchronous learning network on scientific inquiry skills. International Journal of Science Education, 27(8), 957-983.

technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, metacognition, online, learning, distance, TEDLE

Blogged with Flock

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?

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

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