Rick West

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

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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

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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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This post continues on the theme of my last posting related to the research on distance education impacts from extraneous cognitive load. To reiterate, this material is mostly from a chapter I helped to write these last few months with Drs. Hannafin, Hill and Song for the upcoming new edition of the Handbook of Distance Education.

After I looked at what research studies existed related to extraneous load in DE settings, I researched what kinds of experiments have been done in regards to other kinds of cognitive load. Germane cognitive load is an interesting theory stating that some cognitive load is actually a good thing, because it creates schemas or mental models for enabling more efficient learning in the future. For example, maybe while learning a particular set of materials, I spend some cognitive resources constructing schemas for organizing this material in my memory. This increases my total cognitive load at the moment, but we can be forgiving of this because the mental schemas I create will make learning this material so much easier in the future. The general thinking among cognitive load researchers is that we should try to decrease extraneous cognitive load while increasing germane cognitive load, because this will equal more efficient learning.

This all kind of reminds me of the “Bad Cholesterol/Good Cholesterol” idea that maybe some cholesterol is okay, even beneficial. So, you know, cognitive load isn’t ALWAYS a bad thing — it just depends on what kind of load it is!

So can germane cognitive load be improved in distance education? It’s hard to say for sure because few germane CL studies are done explicitly in DE settings. Most of this research is typically done in traditional learning environments. In these kinds of settings, I found the following to be typical of the research being conducted (to quote from the upcoming book chapter):

Researchers report benefits from providing students worked examples (problems showing an example along with the step-by-step solution process); likewise, self-explanation may help to increase schema creation (Gerjets, Scheiter & Catrambone, 2004; Paas &van Merrienboer, 1994; Paas, 1992; Reed & Bolstad, 1991; Renkl, Atkinson,& Grosse 2004; Renkl, Stark, Gruber, & Mandl, 1998; Sweller, 1988).Other methods for increasing germane load include the use of example elaboration and example comparison (Gerjets, Scheiter, & Catrambone, 2004),and fading procedures (Renkl et. al., 2003; Renkl, et. al., 2004). As a result of highly developed mental models, students may better transfer learning (Paas& van Merrienboer, 1994).

All of these findings are for non-distance education settings, but the point we make in the chapter is that these may also be effective methods related to germane CL in distance education. The biggest finding, though, is that we just don’t know because it hasn’t been thoroughly researched and tested in online environments. This opens up a plethora of research opportunities for folks who could look at questions such as:

1. How do you use self-explanation to increase germane load in DE?
2. How are schemas constructed in online learning?
3. How do you use elaboration and example comparison methods online?
4. How does fading work in DE?
5. etc., etc. … Take any of the methods developed for increasing germane CL and ask how well it works online and what adaptations are needed.
6. More importantly, I feel, is this question: How do you measure germane cognitive load in online settings so that we can have a reliable measuring stick as researchers?

What research has been done about developing germane CL in online settings usually is related to navigation methods. A good example of these kinds of studies was one conducted by Eveland and colleagues (2004). I summarized this study in the chapter:

Research on developing, instantiating and inducing mental schemas relies may also assist influence the cognitive load of to-be-learned concepts. In a study by Eveland and colleagues (2004), two groups of participants (college students and nonstudents) explored for 20 minuteshealth topic websites designed with either linear navigation or nonlinear navigation. They then post-tested participant understanding of factual information using a questionnaire and asking them to list and rate relationships among concepts they remembered (knowledge structure density). Whereas participants learned factual information best from linear websites, nonlinearsites improved knowledge structure density which they interpreted to be more transferable knowledge. The study also suggests that nonlinear websites may increase germane load (positive load) Interestingly, in a previous study by the same researchers, nonlinear websites increased extraneous (negative) load(Eveland, et al. 2001).

Overall takeaways for me on this subject were that germane CL research seems to be a very relevant line of research as we struggle with how to develop more efficient learning. However, there doesn’t seem to be much research done beyond looking at site navigation and surfing habits, and these studies are often done by communication researchers, not education researchers (not that we can’t learn a lot from these folks). It seems there are a lot of open doors here to study how to develop germane CL in online settings.

I’d be interested in hearing if anybody is involved in such a study!

References

Eveland, W. P., Cortese, J., Park, H., & Dunwoody,
S. (2004). How Web site organization influences free recall, factual knowledge,
and knowledge structure density. Human
Communication Research, 30(2), 208-233.

Eveland, W. P., & Dunwoody, S. (2001). User
control and structural isomorphism or disorientation and cognitive load? Communication Research, 28(1), 48.

Gerjets, P., & Scheiter, K. (2003). Goal
configurations and processing strategies as moderators between instructional
design and cognitive load: Evidence from hypertext-based instruction. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 33-41.

Gerjets, P., Scheiter, K., & Catrambone, R.
(2004). Designing instructional examples to reduce intrinsic cognitive load:
Molar versus modular presentation of solution procedures. Instructional Science, 32(1), 33-58.

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 Handbook of Distance Education.

Reed, S. K. & Bolstad, C. A. (1991). Use of
examples and procedures in problem solving. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 17(4): 753-766.

Renkl, A., Atkinson, R. K., & Grosse, C. S.
(2004). How fading worked solution steps works: A cognitive load perspective. Instructional Science, 32(1), 59-82.

Renkl, A., Stark, R., Gruber, H., & Mandl, H.
(1998). Learning from worked-out examples: The effects of example variability
and elicited self-explanations. Contemporary
Educational Psychology, 23, 90-108.

Renkl, A., & Atkinson, R. K. (2003). Structuring
the transition from example study to problem solving in cognitive skill
acquisition: A cognitive load perspective. Educational
Psychologist, 38(1), 15-22.

Paas, F. G. W. C. (1992). Training strategies for
attaining transfer of problem-solving skill in statistics: A cognitive-load
approach. Journal of Educational
Psychology. 84(4), 429-434.

Paas, F. G. W. C., & van Merrienboer, J. J. G.
(1994). Variability of worked examples and transfer of geometrical
problem-solving skills: A cognitive-load approach. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 122-133.

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem
solving. Cognitive Science, 12,
257-285.

technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, BlogTracks, BlogTracks2006, distance, education, germane, cognitive, load, handbook

One of the reasons why we decided to do this BlogTracks presentation is that several of us were involved in different kinds of literature reviews around the topic of distance learning, and this BlogTracks would give us a way to discuss some of our findings. For the last several months I have been working with Drs. Michael Hannafin, Janette Hill, and Liyan Song on a chapter about the cognitive implications for distance learning environments, to be included in the upcoming edition of the Handbook of Distance Education. This was a revision of a previous chapter written by Drs. Hannafin and Hill, along with Kevin Oliver, Evan Glazer, and Priya Sharma, included in the previous Handbook’s edition. Anyway, I was very thrilled to be included in the revision of the chapter, because the original chapter, I thought, was an excellent addition to the Distance Ed literature. It filled a hole by looking specifically at cognitive and learning factors of web-based environments, and the authors did a good job of being careful and critical of what research studies they included in their analysis. In the upcoming Handbook, they were invited to expand the original cognitive and learning factors chapter into two chapters … I was involved with the cognitive factors chapter.

This was an excellent opportunity for me to get a better grip on traditional constructs of human cognition, and understand how cognition is impacted in cyberspace. One of the constructs that I was asked to research was impacts on cognitive load in technology-enhanced environments. There are, of course, different kinds of cognitive load. Extraneous load is created by the instructional method. So a dense textbook will create more cognitive load than a picture book. Anyway, in researching cognitive load in distance education, I did not find a lot of relevant research studies using distance learning environments, although there is a lot of research done with multimedia, which could be a component of distance education, but not necessarily.

Of the research I did find, it seems that there are two aspects of distance ed that can increase extraneous load in students. One is the use of hyperlinking. To quote from a portion of the upcoming chapter that I worked on:

    In a study of 39 undergraduate students in an educational computing course, Niederhauser, Reynolds, Salmen, and Skolmoski (2000) conducted tested the impact of different navigational patterns on learning using hyperlinked text. They used surveys to assess students’ reading ability, domain knowledge, and background using computers. Computer software was used to measure the time spent reading each screen and navigation patterns, and a posttest questionnaire and essay assignment were employed to measure learning. As expected, they found that reading comprehension, background knowledge, and reading time were positively related to learning. They were surprised to learn, however, that using hyperlinked material to compare and contrast concepts had a negative influence on learning. The authors concluded that the hypertext environment’s increased cognitive load negatively impacted student learning.

    Similarly, Eveland and Dunwoody (2001) divided 219 students into five groups taught via different online materials. One group browsed a website using linear navigation buttons, while another group browsed a site with links embedded throughout the material to encourage students to explore the content nonlinearly. A third group used nonlinear links with linear navigational guides; the remaining students served as a paper-based and independent task control groups. All groups were given 15 minutes to study the material, and completed a posttest asking them to rate their motivation and Web expertise and the difficulty of learning. The paper-based control group outperformed two of the three Web-based groups, suggesting that Web-based hyperlinking, in the absence of advice, increased extraneous cognitive load associated with learning.

Another finding that we saw in the literature is that limited prior knowledge of the technology used to facilitate the distance learning environment could lead to increased extrinsic load. Simply put, if you’re not used to using Blackboard, for example, taking a course administed by Blackboard will increase your cognitive load. To quote again from the upcoming chapter: 

    Clarke, Ayres, and Sweller (2005) assigned 24 Australian 9th graders into four groups based on their experience using spreadsheets and mathematics abilities. They compared technology instruction prior to domain instruction with simultaneous instruction in both and measured student ability to perform math and spreadsheet problems and obtained subjective ratings of cognitive load. These researchers reported that initial technology instruction followed by domain instruction was most effective for students with low prior spreadsheet abilities, rather than teaching both concurrently. Concurrent instruction in technology and domain content apparently simultaneously increased extraneous, while decreasing germane, cognitive load.

I recently had an article published in TechTrends (West, Wright, Gabbitas, and Graham, 2006) that reported similar findings. We were attempting to integrate blogs, aggregators, and wikis into a preservice instructional technology course at a time when these tools were pretty new and unknown (don’t you love it that it took this long to get the article published, and now those tools are pretty common?). We found that because most students had not used these tools before, the technical barriers created such an extensive extraneous load that it impaired their abilities to understand the potential value of these tools. Even though we gave workshops to teach them how to use the tools, and the tools were fairly simple (we used Blogger and Bloglines), because the students were unfamiliar with the tools, they didn’t catch on or “get” how they could really be used as learning tools. It was almost like the cognitive load created by their unfamiliarity with the tools–even though they could demonstrate adequate competency with the tools–made learning with the tools difficult. We had underestimated how this would impact the entire semester. We knew the first week or two of using the tools would be rough, but the struggles continued all semester long.

This has big impacts, of course, in studying learning in distance education. If we find that there is no improvement in learning from using a new technology-enhanced environment, then maybe there is still some extra extraneous load hanging around from their unfamiliarity with the tools that is distorting the learning outcomes.

How do we get around that? I don’t know. And while we can argue that people are growing more and more comfortable with distance education technologies, there are always new and exciting technologies being created, so the problem will continue.

References

Clarke, T., Ayres, P., & Sweller, J. (2005). The impact of sequencing and prior knowledge on learning mathematics through spreadsheet applications. Educational Technology Research & Development, 53(3), 15-24.

Eveland, W. P., & Dunwoody, S. (2001). User control and structural isomorphism or disorientation and cognitive load? Communication Research, 28(1), 48.

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 Handbook of Distance Education.

Niederhauser, D. S., Reynolds, R. E., Salmen, D. J., & Skolmoski, P. (2000). The influence of cognitive load on learning from hypertext. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 23(3), 237-255.

West, R. E., Wright, G. W., Gabbitas, B., & Graham, C. R. (in press). Reflections from the
            Introduction of Blogs and RSS Feeds Into a Preservice Instructional Technology Course.
            TechTrends. 50(4): 54-60.

technorati tags:handbook, distance, education, technology, BlogTracks, AECT200, AECT

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So last week I lamented the lack of research being done about one of the most widely implemented distance learning technologies, the course management system, and then today I opened up my AERA reviewer’s box and found two proposals related to CMSs for me to review.

I was elated! The titles were catchy, and it seemed we might be getting somewhere. Then I read the proposals.

One was a five-interview study on faculty perceptions of switching from one CMS to another. Like most research on CMSs, this was a diminutive study, tenuously supported by theory and not very generalizable in its implications. The other proposal ended up not being about research at all, but was a proposed roundtable to teach attendees about different CMS technologies. While it seemed like the author is knowledgeable and might teach a good workshop, as a research paper proposal, it fell short.

So in the end reviewing these proposals only strengthened my belief that we really haven’t effectively studied the impacts from implementing CMS technologies yet.

technorati tags:AECT2006, BlogTracks, BlogTrack, CMS, distance, learning, research, literature

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Myung-Hwa recently posted a short blurb to introduce her BlogTracks blog:

I am currently taking a comps. I have read my books and articels about the small grouop collaborative learning. Today, I read instructors’ role and tools. I am thinking about providinge a tool to my research participants in my dissertation. but I do not know if they can use the tool. So, I almost decide a courseware system that an instructor provides. Do you think WebCT or blackboard is a collaborative tool?

MyungHwa

I thought her question at the end was interesting. Is WebCT and Blackboard a collaborative tool? Has anyone really studied this issue? This is something that I have been interested in lately, which is studying more closely the impact from using CMS tools in higher education. Richard Clark disciples argue that technology does not impact learning, but I think most educational researchers would now say that this argument is behind us. Pedagogy will always be more important than technology, but technology does impact what kinds of pedagogy you can, or are more likely, to employ. So technologies like CMS tools are very important, and it is critical that institutions don’t employ CMS technologies without giving serious thought to what kinds of pedagogies they will promote.

My role in this Blog Tracks is mostly to discuss the historical development of the literature and to look at new patterns in the publication of current research. An interesting pattern that I have found is that there is surprisingly very, very little research done about the impact of using a course management tool in higher education, and the research that has been completed is very weak and not very comprehensive and more along the lines of “did this class like using WebCT? We found that they did like it” or something else that really doesn’t tell us much.

In a review of the literature that I did recently for an article, I found several small research studies reporting that using a CMS can be helpful for improving communication and collaboration in a course (Hutchins, 2001; Pollack, 2003); increasing student preparation for class and improving the quality of in-class time (Massimo, 2003); enhancing class lectures and feedback to students about grades (Morgan, 2003); giving students greater access to materials (Yip, 2004); and improving learning in other ways (Klecker, 2002). However, other studies have found no significant difference between the grades of students using a CMS and students who did not (Vessell, 2001), and that the benefits of using a CMS can be counter-balanced by many flaws in the software, causing slowness or instability (Dutton, Cheong, & Park, 2004).

In my search of several of the major databases in the fall of 2005 (ERIC, Education Full Text, WebSPIRS, PsychInfo and Ingenta) I found 164 published articles that mentioned course management systems, Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, CMS, or other similar terms in the abstracts. But of these, only 74 appeared to be data-driven articles, and most of these were quick evaluations of how a CMS impacted a particular class or context. Less than 10 studies seemed to attempt a more general evaluation of the impact from using a CMS over multiple contexts, such as multiple university departments.

Two of the more extensive evaluations of CMS technologies have been completed by the Educause Center for Applied Research (Morgan, 2003; ECAR, 2005). In these reports, the authors have used survey research to conclude there are many positive effects from using course management systems, and that the majority of instructors and students are satisfied with these technologies. However I’m a little suspicious of these reports because I don’t know if they had completely objective purposes.

So I argue that we haven’t really done a very good job of studying what happens when a CMS tool is implemented university-wide, as has happened to thousands of institutions across the country. It is becoming more and more imperative that we DO study the effect of using CMS tools because now over 95% of colleges and universities use some form of e-learning system (Pollack, 2003), usually an expensive course management system. I’m still quite surprised that schools will easily fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars for a CMS without extensive research into whether having that CMS will actually improve learning. In fact I’m more than surprised, as a taxpayer I’m very upset about it!

To close, I pose these questions for discussion, and will share my thoughts on them in a later post, if I remember :-).

1. Why isn’t more research conducted about CMS technologies?

2. What kind of research should we be conducting about CMSs? What outcomes? What measures?

3. Do you agree with me that we’re making a mistake by ignoring CMSs in our educational research?

4. Have we missed the opportunity to really see what happens from implementing a CMS because the tools are now almost as ubiquitous as word processing at some universities?

Note: Some of this material was taken, in a couple of places verbatim, from an article I am preparing for publication. I’d post the whole article here if it wasn’t the case that some journals would consider that to be a “prior publishing” of the article and the article would then be disqualified from further publication. That’s ridiculous if you ask me, but I don’t make the rules!

References

Dutton, W. H., Cheong, P. H., & Park, N. (2004). The social shaping of a virtual learning
    environment: The case of a university-wide course management system. Electronic
    Journal of e-Learning, 2(1), 69-80.

Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR). (2005). ECAR Study of Students and
    Information Technology, 2005: Convenience, Connection, Control, and Learning.
    Accessed February 24, 2006, from http://www.educause.edu/ers0506.

Hutchins, H. M. (2001). Enhancing the business communication course through WebCT.
    Business Communications Quarterly, 64(3), 87-95.

Klecker, B. M. (2002). Evaluation of electronic Blackboard enhancement of a graduate course in
    school counseling. Paper presented at the conference for the Mid-South Educational
    Research Association, held at Chattanooga, TN.

Massimo, V. S. (2003). Integrating the WebCT discussion feature into social work courses: An
    assessment focused on pedagogy and practicality. Journal of Technology in Human
    Services. 22(1), 49-64.

Morgan, G. (2003). Faculty use of course management systems. Denver: Educause Center for
    Applied Research.

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.

Yip, M. C. W. (2004). Using WebCT to teach courses online. British Journal of Educational
    Technology, 35(4), 497-501.

technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, Blogtrack, CMS, distance, education, research

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I’m not sure what this post will have to do with distance education, but it’s what is on my mind after reading a couple of interesting posts from my colleague in this BlogTracks, Denise. She is focusing her research on informal learning in DE environments and gives a definition of informal learning as coming from Falk, Scott, Dierking, Rennie, & Cohen Jones (2004):

shifts in attitudes, values, and beliefs; aesthetic understandings; psychomotor skills, such as discovering how it feels to turn a pot or play an instrument; social/cultural dimensions such as learning about someone in your family; and process skills such as thinking critically and refining one’s learning skills, or perhaps even learning more about how to use a museum for lifelong learning. (p. 172)

Bloglines | My Feeds (345) (410)

She then concludes by asking, “See? Messy. How on earth do you begin to assess this, particularly when
the learners themselves are often unaware that they have learned?”

Indeed! How can you measure informal learning? This is a question I’ve thought about a lot in the past because I am interested in evaluation studies, but also have interests in studies about communities of learning and human interaction impacts on learning, which involves a lot of informal learning. So I believe personally that these messy, non-cognitive aspects of education, can have as big, or bigger, impact on a student’s future happiness, success, and lifelong learning as cognitive aspects. I think it matters a great deal more what a student can do, how they control their own emotions, regulate their own motivations and actions, relate to others, and develop inner integrity, rather than what they memorize from a textbook.

And yet it’s the latter, what they memorize from a textbook, that you would think is most important because of recent policy emphasis on test scores. I don’t believe that this textbook learning is as important as informal learning. Can I prove it? Not really, because of what Denise said: How do you assess it?

This brings me to another question: If you can’t assess it, is it then not important? Of course not. To argue that is silly. There are a lot of things that are important that are difficult to assess. But if we require educational goals to be tied to assessments, then we are requiring educators to ignore many other important aspects of learning.

As I write this I am cringing. Do I believe educators should be accountable to do a good job? Yes. Do I believe we should care that students do better on tests and have basic math, science and English skills? Yes. So I do believe in testing and using tests to guide teaching. I just don’t want to also ignore the messy, harder-to-assess-but-still-important educational goals.

Another thought on my mind this week is my own four-year-old attending school for the first time—full-time preschool. As I watch her go to school and see the classrooom situation, it is easily apparent that she’ll be learning a lot of wonderful things. But I wonder what kinds of informal learning she will pick up that I might not want her to learn so young? She will now spend as much time associating with a teacher I have met for only 10 minutes, and students I haven’t met at all, than with me and her mother. Will she pick up more values, attitudes, expectations, etc. from her teacher or from me? Hopefully her teacher has a lot of the same values, attitudes, and expectations that we do so that it doesn’t matter too much, but who knows?

This long rambling of a personal nature, I guess, comes to this point: I agree with Denise that informal learning is a much more powerful component of who we become than we tend to think, and is much more important than current educational policies account for. We should be thinking a LOT more about what students are learning informally, and it’s embarrassing that there is so little research done about informal learning on the web, since so many young people spend so much time on the Internet.

Go Denise! Fill that research gap!

technorati tags:blogtracks, AECT2006, Blogtracks2006, AECT, informal, learning

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On Slashdot today, it was referenced that Wal-mart is trying to create a hip, cool alternative to MySpace targeted at kids wanting to social network online with (you know this is why they are doing it) money in their pockets. In the Slashdot post, there is a funny point made:

Oh, and it calls users “hubsters” — a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool.

Advertising Age - Wal-Mart Tries to Be MySpace. Seriously

So my question is, can you engineer cool? This goes back to my previous post about whether or not we can successfully engineer social learning networks, using principles from popular social networks like MySpace. Can we distill what makes these things “work” and “cool” and then engineer them for educational purposes?

technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, BlogTracks, MySpace, social, network

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One area of research that I have been interested in the past few years have been computer-supported models of collaborative learning, particularly virtual communities of practice. I am excited to be able to take a course in CoPs this coming semester, although I need to start doing some brain exercises to get ready to read Lave and Wenger’s famous book (1991) all the way through. That’s some tough, but brilliant, material.

It seems to me, however, that there is an interesting divide in the literature about online communities of learning. From some researchers, the message seems to be that online communities of learning do not work very often (Hewitt, 2005; Schwen & Hara, 2003; Van der Meijden & Veenman, 2005). 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.

I think an interesting research idea 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. The 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.

Robert Alford in The Craft of Inquiry suggests that researchers should write down theoretical questions, and then empirical questions that derive from the theoretical questions. So here’s a stab at what some research questions might be related to this topic:

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?

What do you think? Are these questions valuable at all to research? Am I right in that there seems to be an interesting divide between those who think VCoPs work and those who think they don’t? Has anyone studied the application of popular social networks to online learning networks as I propose? I assume somebody has, so if you can drop names and references that would be great. I don’t anticipate studying this in the near future as my graduate research is going in a slightly different direction, but I’d like to study this more someday.

References

Alford, R. R. (1998). The craft of inquiry: Theories, methods, evidence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hewitt, J. (2005). Toward an Understanding of How Threads Die in Asynchronous Computer Conferences. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(4), 567-589.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schwen, T. M., & Hara, N. (2003). Community of Practice: A Metaphor for Online Design? Information Society, 19(3), 257.

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.

technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, BlogTracks, community, practice, CSCL, MySpace, Friendster, social, network

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