Florence Dujardin's List: e-learning

This case study looks at an innovative way of providing feedback to students on their written work in English Language Teaching courses. This method has already led to considerable interest in the academic world (including articles in the THES (December 2006) and The Guardian (June 2007)) and can be used by lecturers in many other disciplines.

This method is based around the idea of using 'screen capture software', software which basically allows you to record the screen of your computer as if you had a video camera pointed at it. Everything you do on the screen is recorded and can be played back as a video and if you have a microphone connected it will also record your voice. Though the technology has been around for many years it is only recently that its possibilities as a tool for providing student feedback have been investigated.

So how can YOU get a great student-driven blog up and running in YOUR classroom? Here are three of my favorite tips.

Tip 1: Create ONE Topic-Focused Blog
Tip 2: Train Student Editors to Lead Your Blogging Project
Tip 3: Recruit Readers and Commenters to Your Blog

My experience is that communities of practice can help make the transition from hierarchies to networks, or as Jon Husband describes the resulting structure; wirearchy. Communities of practice, both internal and external; can be safe places between highly focused work and potentially chaotic social networking. The Community Roundtable has a Community Maturity Model that describes this transition, in four stages. The model makes it relatively easy to see where your organization stands and where it should go.
From hierarchies to wirearchies by @hjarche http://t.co/HtAMXmAnzz

The internet and the mobile phone have disrupted many of our conventional understandings of our selves and our relationships, raising anxieties and hopes about their effects on our lives. This timely and vibrant book provides frameworks for thinking critically about the roles of digital media in personal relationships. Rather than providing exuberant accounts or cautionary tales, it offers a data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life.

The book identifies the core relational issues these media disturb and shows how the ways we talk about them echo historical discussions about earlier communication technologies. Chapters explore how we use mediated language and nonverbal behavior to develop and maintain communities, social networks, new relationships, and to maintain relationships in our everyday lives. It combines research findings with lively examples to address questions such as whether mediated interaction can be warm and personal, whether people are honest about themselves online, whether relationships that start online can work, and whether using these media damages the other relationships in our lives. Throughout, the book argues for approaching these questions with firm understandings of the qualities of media as well as the social and personal contexts in which they are developed and used.

Personal Connections in the Digital Age will be required reading for all students and scholars of media, communication studies, and sociology, as well as all those who want a firmer understanding of digital media and everyday life.

In this paper we examine the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) suggesting that the model may be enhanced through a fuller articulation of the roles of online learners. We present the results of a study of 3165 students in online and hybrid courses from 42 two- and four-year institutions in which we examine the relationship between learner self-efficacy measures and their ratings of the quality of their learning in virtual environments. We conclude that a positive relationship exists between elements of the CoI framework and between elements of a nascent theoretical construct that we label “learning presence”. We suggest that learning presence represents elements such as self-efficacy as well as other cognitive, behavioral, and motivational constructs supportive of online learner self-regulation. We suggest that this focused analysis on the active roles of online learners may contribute to a more thorough account of knowledge construction in technology-mediated environments expanding the descriptive and explanatory power of the Community of Inquiry framework. Learning presence: Towards a Theory of Self-efficacy, Self-regulation, and the Development of a Communities of Inquiry in Online and Blended Learning Environments.

Metacognition is a required cognitive ability to achieve deep and meaningful learning that must be viewed from both an individual and social perspective. Recently, the transition from the earliest individualistic models to an acknowledgement of metacognition as socially situated and socially constructed has precipitated the study of metacognition in collaborative learning environments. This study presents the results of research to develop and validate a metacognitive construct for use in collaborative learning environments. The metacognitive construct was developed using the Community of Inquiry framework as a theoretical guide and tested applying qualitative research techniques in previous research and has been tested in this research by way of developing a metacognition questionnaire. The results indicate that in order to better understand the structure and dynamics of metacognition in emerging collaborative learning environments, we must go beyond individual approaches to learning and consider metacognition in terms of complementary self and co-regulation that integrates individual and shared regulation.

Objective - To evaluate using an Internet-based social networking site within an elective geriatric pharmacotherapy course.
Design - Thirty pharmacy students enrolled in a geriatric pharmacotherapy elective course were invited to join a closed Facebook (Facebook Inc, Palo Alto, CA) group to enhance communication among students and faculty members within the course. Creating a discussion board was the primary activity in the course. Each week, 3 students were assigned to post a healthy aging topic, and other students in the class were expected to post their comments and reactions. The healthy aging topics also were discussed during class.
Assessment - Students wrote reflections about their experiences using Facebook for the activities within this course. A survey instrument also measured students' opinions about using Facebook for educational purposes.
Conclusion - Using Facebook allowed students to discuss topics more openly and encouraged classroom discussions of healthy aging topics.