If you are engaged in any sort of inquiry into the use of technology in education (whether a student, research, instructor, etc), the following recommendation cannot be emphasized enough:
“Given the increasingly complex role that technology now plays in education and the growing need for clarity around what technology can and cannot do to improve learner success, it is critical that the research we do addresses real-world educational needs and is disseminated in a way that can meaningfully inform design practice. It is, therefore, becoming increasingly clear that the field’s major outlets for disseminating our scholarship should be organized around the problemswe are trying to address (flagging learner engagement, poor teaching, rising costs of education, lack of accessibility) rather than the things we are using to solve those problems (learning analytics, online learning, gamification, 3D printing, and the like).”
In short: study problems, not things.
The quote comes from the call of proposals for AECT’s latest Handbook of Research in Educational Communications and Technology.
I wrote a guest post for the Chronicle’s Prof Hacker section describing our use of video and audio to summarize our research findings. The post was published today and it is available here, but I am reposting it below as well.
I use an eclectic assortment of learning resources in my courses. Books, peer-reviewed journal articles, op-eds, white papers, websites, documentaries, lecture videos, podcasts. Readings – especially peer-reviewed journal articles – are integral to my teaching, but I am intentional in my desire to go beyond text, to be inclusive and diverse in my selection of learning resources. In my research, and in my attempts to include multimodal learning resources in my teaching, I discovered that we could do a better job at sharing our scholarship.
One of the ways that I am using to share my scholarship in different ways is through the creation of short video and audio clips that accompany each one of my published papers. I believe these might be helpful to colleagues, students, and broader audiences. Colleagues might use them as a way to introduce, humanize, and explore a topic. Students might access them at times when listening is preferable to reading. For example, I listen to podcasts on bus rides because reading on the bus makes me feel dizzy. Others might be in the same predicament. Some students in our research noted that they watched video lectures when engaging in other activities – such as cooking – as a way to accommodate their studies in their busy lives. Broader audiences, such as the general public or journalists, might find video and audio clips valuable as well, as these clips contain information that usually resides behind journal paywalls.
The audio is hosted on my personal SoundCloud channel. Here’s a playlist:
We follow a simple process to create these. For each published paper, I collaborate with members of my research group to (a) write a script, (b) record an mp3 file, and (c) produce an animated movie. These media are produced by two individuals using off-the-shelf software. One person writes the script and shares it with the other using a shared Dropbox folder. When I narrate the script, I use Audacity to create the audio file. When my colleague Laura Pasquini narrates, she uses GarageBand. We use instrumental music shared under Creative Commons licenses as background. Once the audio file is created, I post it in on my SoundCloud channel and users can stream it or download it from there. Next, we use VideoScribe to create the animation and since the software is cloud-based, we can both review the draft version of the video prior to publication. The final video is then posted on a YouTube account dedicated to these videos.
My research team and I are enjoying exploring the many ways available at our disposal to share our scholarship. We know that creating a video trailer or writing a blog post about a publication isn’t a substitute for high-quality scholarship, but we are enthused at the opportunity to use new technologies to mobilize our research. What are some other ways that you have discovered to share your research with colleagues, students, and the broader public?
What do scholars share on social media? Like the jelly jars below, some topics shared/discussed are familiar. The center jelly nn the top row? I’ve seen many of those. A scholar sharing a link to a paper? I’ve seen many of those, too. Other jellies, and scholarly activities online, are more complex and require a closer look. The bottom right jelly? I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Some scholars disclose challenging professional and personal issues on social media. That’s what Bonnie Stewart and I set out to understand in a our paper Discreet Openness: Scholars’ Selective and Intentional Self-Disclosures Online. Popular literature tends to offer conflicting advice on this topic. Scholars are encouraged to share both personal and professional aspects of their self online, but at the same time they are advised to “watch what they say.” The empirical literature examining scholars’ online self-disclosures and the reasons for making these disclosures remains limited.
Research into emergent forms of scholarship focuses on academics’ use of technology for learning, teaching, and research. Very little attention has been paid in the literature to scholars’ uses of social media to disclose challenging personal and professional issues. This article addresses the identified gap in the literature and presents a qualitative investigation into the types of disclosures that 16 scholars made online and their reasons for doing so. Results identify wide-ranging personal and professional disclosures. Participants disclosed not only about academia-related issues but also about challenges pertaining to family, mental health, physical health, identity, and relationships. Some scholars disclosed as a way to grapple with challenges they faced; others disclosed tactically, sharing information for political rather than personal reasons. Yet others disclosed as a way to welcome care in their lives. In all instances, though, disclosures were selective, intentional, and approached with foresight.
How do people learn in digital and online contexts?In this chapter, Terry Anderson examines a variety of way to theorize online learning including social constructivism, heautagogy, and connectivism.
Anderson, T. (2016). Theories for Learning with Emerging Technologies. In G. Veletsianos (Ed.), Emergence and Innovation in Digital Learning: Foundations and Applications (pp. 35-50). Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press.
Last month we invited applications from and provided funding to advanced doctoral students and early-career researchers to conduct research with our research group. Michael Paskevicius received one of these awards and we are supporting him in his endeavour to make sense of the discourse around openness and open education. You can read more about this project on his website. One of the steps involved in this process is identifying Twitter hashtags that are related to openness and open education. Below are the hashtags that we have so far. We would love your help. Do you know of any other hashtags used in the context of openness or open education? If so, could you please add them to this shared spreadsheet?
Once we have a list to start with, we’ll search tweets tagged with those hashtags for co-occcurring hashtags, and we’ll add those below as well.
Digital learning is messy and complex. Yet, it’s often portrayed as a solution to the perils facing educational systems or as a cause of those problems. Ross and Collier call for a recognition of the messiness of digital learning. As emerging technologies and practices practices are not yet fully understood or researched, these authors provide a compass to help readers make sense of digital learning environments and their design. They argue that in designing digital learning we
should avoid emulating established practices,
could gain fruitful knowledge about the instructor’s role if consider the online instructors’ body, and
should consider how calls for accountability and data science are unsatisfactory for modern educational systems
The terms “emerging technologies” and “emerging practices ”are catch-all phrases that are often misused and haphazardly defined. This chapter defines those two terms. It argues that what makes technologies and practices emerging are not specific technologies (e.g., virtual reality) or practices (e.g., openness), but the environments in which particular technologies or practices operate. It is argued that emerging technologies and emerging practices share four characteristics:
not defined by newness;
coming into being;
not-yet fully understood or researched (i.e. not-yetness); and
