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