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

Blogged with Flock

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

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

The following is the abstract:

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

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

Blogged with Flock