Eric Calvert's List: ISSN Social Learning Tech

• Here are three strategies that can be used to encourage   peer-to-peer, student-to-student engagement and thus the building of a   course community,

   
   
  • Launch the class with a personal introduction posting so that students   can get to know one another and you get to know "where students'   heads are." The types of info often shared by faculty and students   include info on professional experiences, personal information such   as family/friends/pets, and a photograph. Faculty also often include   a note about their teaching philosophy and research projects.
   
  • Encourage use of a general open student forum for students to post   and request help and assistance from each other through the various   student-to-student tools, such as discussions, help areas, etc.
   
  • Set up small groups where students can assume responsibility for supportive   mentoring of fellow students and summarizing key points of a class assignment.   The students might work in groups of 4-5. This strategy is similar to   a study group. (This may be something you want to try with the data   analysis assignments.) If you want to do this, ask Susan for help.)  
   
  • Set up problem-solving forums or discussions boards, and assign students   or student teams to monitor and support or direct questions.

• If you're new to this world, personal learning networks are created by an individual learner, specific to the learner’s needs extending relevant learning connections to like-interested people around the globe.

• To clear up some of the confusion around these comments and assertions, I went straight to the top: the Department of Education’s Director of Education Technology, Karen Cator.

   

  Cator parsed the rules of the Childrens Internet Protection Act, and provided guidance for teachers on how to proceed when it comes to interpreting the rules. To that end, here are six surprising rules that educators, administrators, parents and students might not know about website filtering in schools.
• Accessing YouTube is not violating CIPA rules. “Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules,” Cator says. “The rule is to block inappropriate sites. All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.”
• Websites don’t have to be blocked for teachers.
• There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.”
• Broad filters are not helpful. “What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game,” she said. “These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering.”
• Schools will not lose E-rate funding by unblocking appropriate sites. Cator said she’s never heard of a school losing E-rate funding due to allowing appropriate sites blocked by filters.
• Kids need to be taught how to be responsible digital citizens. “[We need to] address the topic at school or home in the form of education,” Cator says. “How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space?”
• Teachers should be trusted. “If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it,” she said. “Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.”

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• As online distance learning has grown, so too has interest in self-regulated learning (Boekaerts, Pintrich, & Zeidner, 2000). Self-regulated learning (SRL) has been defined as “an active, constructive process whereby learners set goals for their learning and then attempt to monitor, regulate, and control their cognition, motivation, and behavior, guided and constrained by their goals and the contextual features of the environment” (Pintrich, 2000, p. 453). Self-regulated learners are described as active students who efficiently control their own learning experiences in many different ways, including establishing a conducive work environment and using resources effectively; employing various cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies to help comprehend information to be learned; regulating their emotions during academic tasks; and adopting positive motivational beliefs about their capabilities, the value of learning, and the factors that improve learning (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2008).

• In the last 10 years, several educational psychologists (e.g., Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2004; Hartley & Bendixen, 2001; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1998) have suggested that students require considerable motivation and self-regulation to stay engaged, guide their cognition, and regulate their effort in online situations. This suggestion stems from the belief that learning on the Web tends to be much more autonomous and self-directed (Allen & Seaman, 2007). The highly independent nature of online learning is thought to be due, in part, to the lack of structure and guidance that normally comes from face-to-face, social interactions with an instructor and other students (Moore & Kearsley, 2005).

    

   
• several scholars have found social cognitive models to be particularly useful in analyzing student success in online contexts (e.g., Artino, 2007b; Hodges, 2005; Militiadou & Savenye, 2003). Social cognitive models of self-regulation distinguish themselves from purely cognitive theories in that they focus on the links between students’ personal perceptions and their use of self-generated learning strategies (Pintrich, 1999; Zimmerman, 2000). Moreover, social cognitive models are concerned with explaining how these personal perceptions and associated behaviors are ultimately influenced by contextual features of the learning environment (Pintrich, 2000; Zimmerman, 2000).
• The conceptual model proposed here uses social cognitive self-regulation as its theoretical foundation. At the macro level, the model includes four interacting components: (a) contextual features of the online learning environment, (b) personal perceptions, (c) personal behaviors, and (d) various academic outcomes that result, in part, from these personal perceptions and behaviors.
• Duncan and McKeachie (2005) argued that personal components of self-regulation are not static traits of the learner, but rather that “motivation is dynamic and contextually bound and that learning strategies can be learned and brought under the control of the student” (p. 117). Stated another way, students’ motivations and emotions change from course to course (e.g., depending on their interest in the course, self-efficacy for performing in the course, etc.). Therefore, the extent to which students use adaptive self-regulatory behaviors may vary as well, depending on the nature of the online course and how that course relates to them personally (Boekaerts & Cascallar, 2006).
• Personal Perceptions: Motivational Beliefs
• Social cognitive theories of self-regulation (Pintrich, 2000; Zimmerman, 2000) stress the importance of students’ motivational beliefs in all aspects of SRL. Knowledge of effective learning strategies is not enough to promote and sustain learning; students must also be motivated to employ those strategies when needed (Pintrich & De Groot, 1990). The model proposed here identifies two specific motivational beliefs that researchers have found to be important in both traditional and online contexts: students’ self-efficacy for learning (Bandura, 1997) and the extent to which students value learning tasks (i.e., their task value beliefs; Eccles & Wigfield, 2002).
• Self-efficacy beliefs
• Task value beliefs. Eccles and Wigfield (2002) defined task value as the extent to which students find a task interesting, important, and/or useful. Like perceived self-efficacy, task value beliefs are hypothesized to positively impact students’ learning and performance. Moreover, Schunk (2005) concluded that “students with greater personal interest in a topic and those who view the activity as important or useful are more likely to use adaptive self-regulatory strategies” (p. 87).
• Personal Perceptions: Achievement Emotions
• According to Pekrun’s theory, positive achievement emotions, such as enjoyment and hope, and negative emotions, such as boredom and frustration, are determined, in part, by students’ motivational beliefs, also known as their cognitive appraisals. Furthermore, the effects of emotions on learning and performance are thought to be mediated, in part, by several cognitive and motivational mechanisms, such as students’ use of learning strategies, effort allocation, and persistence (Pekrun et al., 2002).
• negative achievement emotions (e.g., boredom and anger) were negatively related to motivational variables (e.g., interest and effort) and measures of learning strategies use (e.g., elaboration and metacognition); whereas positive emotions (e.g., enjoyment, hope, and pride) were positively related to these same outcomes.
• Findings in online settings, although limited, are similar to the results described above. For example, in a study of two samples of service academy undergraduates (total N = 783), Artino (2008a) found that online learners’ emotions were related to several adaptive outcomes. In particular, findings from several multiple regressions revealed that students’ boredom and frustration were statistically significant predictors of metacognition, with boredom emerging as a negative predictor and frustration unexpectedly emerging as a positive predictor. On the other hand, enjoyment emerged as a positive predictor of both elaboration and metacognition.
• Using the conceptual model presented in this article, online teachers are encouraged to consider and explicitly address their students’ academic motivation, achievement emotions, and self-regulation as they strive to provide effective and engaging online instruction

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• Self-regulated learning refers to the processes by which individual learners attempt to monitor and control their own learning. There are many different models of self-regulated learning that propose different constructs and processes, but they do share some basic assumptions about learning and regulation
• One common assumption might be called the active, constructive assumption that follows from a general cognitive perspective. That is, all the models view learners as active constructive participants in the learning process. A second, but related, assumption is the potential for control assumption. All the models assume that learners can potentially monitor, control, and regulate certain aspects of their own cognition, motivation, and behavior as well as some features of their environments.
• A third general assumption that is made in these models of self-regulated learning is the goal,
• Most models of self-regulation assume that self-regulatory activities are directly linked to outcomes such as achievement and performance
• Given these assumptions, a general working definition of self-regulated learning is that it is an active, constructive process whereby learners set goals for their learning and then attempt to monitor, regulate, and control their cognition, motivation, and behavior, guided and constrained by their goals and the contextual features in the environment. Following this general definition, research on models of self-regulated learning have delineated four general domains that learners can try to self-regulate: (1) cognition, (2) motivation, (3) behavior, and (4) the environment.

• The Development of Self-Regulation

   

  There are a host of factors that can influence the development of self-regulation; three are noted here: cognitive development, motivation, and classroom contexts.
• Accordingly, there is a need to develop explicit instructional strategies and programs to help students learn about self-regulation and develop expertise in regulating their learning.
• Research of Paul R. Pintrich (1999) on the role of motivation in self-regulated learning has suggested three important generalizations about the relations between motivation and self-regulated learning. First, students must feel self-efficacious or confident that they can do the tasks. If they feel they can accomplish the academic tasks, then they are much more likely to use various self-regulation strategies. Second, students must be interested in and value the classroom tasks. Students who are bored or do not find the tasks useful or worthwhile are much less likely to be self-regulating than those who are interested and find the tasks important. Finally, students who are focused on goals of learning, understanding, and self-improvement are much more likely to be self-regulating than students who are pursuing other goals such as trying to look smarter than others, or trying not to look stupid
• Finally, besides developmental and motivational factors, there are contextual factors that play a role in the development of self-regulation. One of the most important is that individuals actually have the opportunity to try to take control of their own learning and are given the chance to try tasks on their own. Of course, it is important that tasks are not too challenging or too easy, but in the students' range of competence. In addition, the modeling and demonstration of various self-regulatory strategies by parents, teachers, and peers can help students learn these strategies. Students also need the opportunity to have guided practice with the use of these strategies, with support and guidance from knowledgeable others, whether they be parents, teachers, or peers. Finally, there should be incentives in the context for the use of these strategies, such that students who are successful in using the strategies are rewarded in terms of praise or more tangible rewards such as better learning and achievement.

• Importance of Self-Regulated Learning

   

  In summary, self-regulated learning is an important aspect of learning and achievement in academic contexts. Students who are self-regulating are much more likely to be successful in school, to learn more, and to achieve at higher levels. Accordingly, it is important for schools and classrooms to attempt to foster the development of expertise in self-regulated learning. Of course, there are developmental, motivational, and contextual factors that can facilitate or constrain self-regulated learning, but there are implicit and explicit ways to help foster self-regulated learning. In the twenty-first century and as the explosion of information and multiple ways of learning increase, it will become even more important that individuals know how to self-regulate their learning and that fostering self-regulated learning becomes an important goal for all educational systems.

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• What’s the key to effective learning? One intriguing body of research suggests a rather gnomic answer: It’s not just what you know. It’s what you know about what you know
• To put it in more straightforward terms, anytime a student learns, he or she has to bring in two kinds of prior knowledge: knowledge about the subject at hand (say, mathematics or history) and knowledge about how learning works. Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge. We’re comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself—the “metacognitive” aspects of learning—is more hit-or-miss, and it shows.
• Research has found that students vary widely in what they know about how to learn, according to a team of educational researchers from Australia writing in this month’s issue of the journal Instructional Science. Most striking, low-achieving students show “substantial deficits” in their awareness of the cognitive and metacognitive strategies that lead to effective learning—suggesting that these students’ struggles may be due in part to a gap in their knowledge about how learning works.
• Askell-Williams cites as one example a recent finding by PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, which administers academic proficiency tests to students around the globe, and place American students in the mediocre middle. “Students who use appropriate strategies to understand and remember what they read, such as underlining important parts of the texts or discussing what they read with other people, perform at least 73 points higher in the PISA assessment—that is, one full proficiency level or nearly two full school years—than students who use these strategies the least,”

• Askell-Williams and her colleagues found that those students who used fewer of these strategies reported more difficulty coping with their schoolwork. For the second part of their study, they designed a series of proactive questions for teachers to drop into the lesson on a “just-in-time” basis—at the moments when students could use the prompting most.

   

  These questions, too, can be adopted by any parent or educator to make sure that children know not just what is to be learned, but how.

   
   
  • What is the topic for today’s lesson?
   
  • What will be important ideas in today’s lesson?
   
  • What do you already know about this topic?
   
  • What can you relate this to?
   
  • What will you do to remember the key ideas?
   
  • Is there anything about this topic you don’t understand, or are not clear about?

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• This paper draws on lessons we have learned about building personal learning environments and virtual communities from our research and experience in formal and non-formal learning environments. It addresses the key questions of how can we construct, maintain and usher out communities, who joins communities, and what characteristics of communities seem to be shared across learning environments.