Rick West

Well, I’ve done it again. I’ve moved my blog to http://the-wests.net/rick. I know, I know, if you are one of the two people out there reading me , I’ve done this before. My reasoning this time is that the Edublogs community is meant to be for educators. I am one, of course, but I also do a some professional out-of-school work, and I wanted the blog to be part of my larger professional site. I also have been listening to several folks argue that you should have your intellectual property on your own server and domain, so you have control over it and cannot be constrained by communities that may fold, companies that may be bought out, or restrictions by domain/server owners. For example, at the University of Georgia you have to have a notice on every webpage hosted on their servers that your content does not represent UGA. Every single page! That is why I am no longer going to host anything at UGA! (except old stuff).

Anyway, so trot on over to http://the-wests.net/rick. It’s got a new look, I’ll soon be putting some new content there, and this will hopefully be my permanent intellectual home.

I hope! .

Michael Barbour, one of the AECT interns this year, is trying to
understand why graduate students seem to be participating less and less
in AECT. He and I both believe that it is partly because of cost. As
Michael writes:

The volunteer commitment for AECT is 12 hours over a two and a half day conference. Let’s compare:

• AERA – student rate $50 (add $35 for non-member)
• SITE – student rate $155 (add $20 for non-member) / volunteer rate $0 with eight hours over three days
• e-Learn – student rate $155 (add $20 for non-member) / volunteer rate $0 with eight hours over three days
• ED-Media – student rate $155 (add $20 for non-member) / volunteer rate $0 with eight hours over three days

We both feel that AECT is building up barriers to its student
population. Wal-mart pays its employees more than AECT pays its
volunteer graduate students! That’s why I’m not serving as a volunteer
this year, even though financially, I could sure use a break as much as
any other grad student. Yes, I am at the conference, because I have
other things that have drawn me into this community. But that’s not the
case for all students.

So if you feel that part of the reason for the
attrition rate of graduate students leaving AECT is because of the
difficult volunteering situation, then see Michael Barbour to sign a
paper petition, or sign an electronic petition at:

http://mkbabd.blogspot.com/2006/10/so-im-finally-at-aect.html

technorati tags:AECT, AECT2006, graduate, students

Blogged with Flock

forgive this test!

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

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!

This is not necessarily distance learning related, but it is a good point … that current NCLB legislation is singling out schools as the only institution responsible for children doing poorly. This was posted by XXX on the EdTECH listserv recently:

This is from Michael Winerip's NYT's column of July 12, 2006

"We need a No Family Left Behind Law. This would measure economic
growth of families and punish politicians in charge of states with
poor economic growth for minority families.

FOR example, in Ohio, black families earn only 62 percent of white
household income, one of the biggest disparities nationally. So every
year, under No Family Left Behind, Ohio would be expected to close
that income gap. If it failed to make adequate yearly progress for
black families' wealth, the governor and legislators would be judged
failing, and after five years, could be removed from office. This way
public schools wouldn't be the only institutions singled out for
failing poor children.

And if states succeeded in closing the economic gap, test scores would
be expected to rise, giving politicians and teachers a chance to
celebrate together."

I haven’t verified this with the original source (Winerip’s column), but regardless, it’s a good quote!

technorati tags:NCLB, school, public

Blogged with Flock

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

Blogged with Flock

I love Zits, the comic strip about a trendy Net Gen teen struggling to make his Baby Boomer parents understand his life. The strip that came out a few days ago is about blogging, and I found it to be funny and oh-so-true:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/zits.asp?date=20060421

I think I sometimes worry too much that I don’t have any material that is “blog-ready” for public disclosure on my blog. So I end up not blogging very much. The truth is that I often have a lot of opinions about a lot of educational topics that I read/write about all the time every day. So if I can chat about these things with my cubicle friends, what keeps me from blogging about it?

To tie this into our BlogTracks presentation: I think a difficulty with this type of presentation format is that while it should be a more informal method for discussion, we still may be hampered by our academic habits and traditions for only sharing perfect, publishable work.

Note to self: In this blog, try to talk more, not less, even if that means the ideas aren’t fully cooked yet. Hopefully through discussing ideas in this space I will be clearer about my ideas in the end, as well as hopefully having contributed something to the discussion myself.

I created this blog originally to be the new home for my thoughts about educational research. My old blog (and consequently my “old” thoughts?) were available at http://edu-blogger.blogspot.com. However, since we received word of being accepted as a BlogTrack presentation at AECT this year, this blog will now be my official place to blog about online learning, as part of our BlogTracks.

But in reality, nothing has changed. Because blogging about online learning is what I would probably do most of the time anyway–BlogTracks acceptance or not!
My interest in online learning first began when I took Computer Supported Collaborative Learning from Dr. Charles Graham at Brigham Young University. I was a newbie in the program … barely scratching the IT surface in only my second semester of study in the master’s program. I wasn’t sure at that point what type of educational research I would be interested in, but through that semester, the idea of collaborative learning intrigued me. It just felt right, as I considered most of my own learning experiences.

Why online environments? Because I think our traditional ideas of what it means to collaborate, work together, socialize, learn, and experience is changing because of the Web. I am not full of technolust like many, and I don’t believe that the change is always good. But our concepts of collaborative learning is changing, and that is exciting for me.

My first research project related to online learning was to compare the quality of reflections created by students in several sections of an Instructional Technology for Teachers course. The control variable was whether the students used face-to-face collaborative discussions, online discussion boards, or individual reflective papers. This project, sad to say, failed miserably and showed all the foibles of a first research endeaver by a newbie in the field. However, I learned a great deal about how to better organize my next research project, how to handle the logistics of data collection and analysis, and, perhaps most importantly, how to be more aware of uncontrollable variables such as different teaching styles and class dynamics.

My second project was to take the same course, but during different semesters, and introduce weblogs as a medium for discussion, collaboration, and reflection. On a practical level, this was an exciting project as several other teachers decided to join me, swelling the pool of student participants into the hundreds. In this project, we used survey/interview methods to look at the impacts from introducing weblogs–both positive and negative.

After that, I spent a year or so working for the Center for Instructional Design at Brigham Young University evaluating the university’s implementation of Blackboard. My interest in this project mainly revolved around learning about the implementation of the collaborative discussion features. Unfortunately, one of our major findings was that nobody used these, and usage instead focused on information transfer! Oye!

I share these experiences merely to give some context to the present project–which is a BlogTracks presentation about the trends in the online learning literature. Now you, the readers and audience for this presentation, understand a little more of my background with online learning. I am now currently a doctoral student at the University of Georgia, still interested in online collaboration and communities of learners, but still not sure of my exact dissertation topic yet. Because of that, my role in this project is to provide a little of the breadth, and I will be discussing some of the historical trends in the literature before passing the baton to Myung Hwa and Janette Hill to describe present and future trends. The other members of this study group will be looking at more specific areas of research, such as informal online learning, and online learning in K-12, higher education, and corporate spheres.

Welcome to our presentation! And please participate by adding your comments to our blogs. To hear all of what we are saying, you only need to subscribe to one feed: http://ugaonlinelearning.suprglu.com/feed/rss20/supr.xml