Category: sharing Page 26 of 41

At the end of last year’s AERA meeting, we passed on the leadership of the Computer & Internet Applications in Education SIG to a new group of individuals. I was honored to serve the SIG as Chair and Program Chair over the last two years, and wish the new officers great success in the years to come.

You can support them by considering the SIG for your AERA proposals and considering joining the SIG at its annual meeting. The new Chair’s welcome message follows:

Dear Computer and Internet Applications in Education (CIAE) SIG members and colleagues,

We would like to use this opportunity to introduce new SIG officers and
invite all of you to consider joining us at the 2013 AERA Annual Meeting
which will be held in San Francisco on April 27-May 1, 2013. We’d like to
thank to the previous members of the SIG executive committee (Dr. George
Veletsianos, Dr. Charles Miller, and Dr. Cassie Scharber) for their
valuable effort in advancing the SIG and organizing the sessions and
activities in AERA 2012. New SIG officers elected to serve are: Dr. Evrim
Baran (chair), Dr. Amy Pittenger (program chair), and Dr. Zeni Colorado
(treasurer). We are now working on to organize the SIG sessions and
activities for the AERA 2013 conference. We’d like to thank to all of our
reviewers who volunteered to help us during the reviewing process.

The purpose of the SIG CIAE is to promote research, teaching, and service
on the design, evaluation and critical use of computer and Internet
applications in education. We strive to be a dynamic group considering the
nature of dynamic and ever–changing landscape of educational environments
with computer and Internet applications. We are excited to see the
potentials of computer and Internet applications in the way we reconsider
our current educational practices and design innovative and critical
solutions for learners, teachers, and practitioners in educational
settings. Our SIG scope, vision and membership profiles reflect the
interest and scholarship in the following themes:

o   Evolving contexts in educational technology: Design, integration, and
evaluation of educational technology
o   The future of hybrid and online education (eg. extreme, adventure,
scenario, and game-based learning)
o   Affordances of emerging technologies and approaches for the design and
evaluation of learning spaces (eg. information visualization tools, online
collaborative learning technologies, mobile platforms, learning analytics,
cloud computing, usability tools)
o   Technology leadership for successful technology integration in
education: In-depth studies throughout the world
o   Contemporary Issues in computers and Internet applications in education
(e. digital literacy, media literacy, privacy, security)

Our membership also have expertise in wide range of research methodologies
such as design-based research, case study, experimental design, mixed
methods, action research, ethnography, survey, content analysis, to name a
few. We hope to advance the research and scholarly conversation in CIAE
with your contribution and presence in our SIG. Please consider submitting
a proposal to the SIG and joining as at our Facebook group (
http://www.facebook.com/groups/419942028043955/) for engaging in
conversation with the SIG members or for more information on how to
actively participate to the activities. Please feel free to distribute this
information to those who would be interested in joining to the SIG.

One last reminder is about the AERA 2013 Annual Meeting submissions. Please
remember that this year proposals should be submitted by July 23, 2012, at
11:59 PM Pacific Time. More information on submission can be found
here<http://www.aera.net/Portals/38/docs/New%20Date%20Call%20for%20Submissions%20AM13%20FINAL%20REVISED.pdf>
.

Feel free to contact me, or any member of the SIG executive committee, if you have questions.

I look forward to welcoming you to the AERA community. Thank you for your
support of AERA CIAE special interest group and education research.

Have a great summer!!!

Regards,

Evrim Baran, Ph.D.

Chair, AERA Computer and Internet Applications in Education SIG
Assistant Professor of Educational Sciences
Middle East Technical University, TURKEY

During the Fall semesters, I teach a course on the foundations of Instructional Design for our MA and PhD students. Two years ago, I shared my syllabus. Last year, I shared one of my favorite activities, in which I ask students to create a digital story comparing two instructional design models. This activity is part of the AECT open content portal, where you can find additional learning objects for educational technology courses.

I am now in the process of redesigning my course to be taught online in the Fall, and I thought I’d share three of the videos that I will be using in case others find them of interest.

The first video describes IDEO’s design process and is intended to introduce students to design thinking:

I use this second video as a discussion prompt for cognitive theories of learning.

And this third one is an instructional video from 1927 that I use to initiate a conversation about efficiency and effectiveness in designing learning materials (and, as a bonus, one from 1937)

Justin Reich asks: “What would you do with years of online discussion data?”

He explains: “[Emily] has access to a huge dataset from a for-profit college which includes student outcomes (graduate rates, annual re-enrollment, course completion), student demographic information, and transcripts from online discussion boards.”

And expands: “what could you do with the online transcripts that could teach you something about improving outcomes? How would you go about identifying practices in online learning environments that predicted better outcomes for students? And if you found those practices, could you understand them with enough granularity to make actionable suggestions for educators?”

Here’s what I think: I think it’s great that Justin is asking these questions. The idea of a lone scholar working by herself in an office and churning out papers is a relic of the past. My recommendation would be to publicize the research questions that you will be answering using that dataset, and then to anonymize and publish the data in the same way that biomedical researchers do. Figure out what you are interested in researching out of this dataset, but then make it available to others who may be able to pursue related research questions. Granted, colleges of education may not place a high value on the publication of datasets, but given that you might be providing the foundations for others to answer important research questions related to online education, I would argue that this should be considered an important scholarly contribution that our community should embrace.

Disclaimer: I am not interested in the dataset as the data do not appear to fit within  my research interests/agenda.

I am excited to lead the conversation during week 33 of the #change11 MOOC. I am looking forward to share my research with you, to learn from and with you, and to help us gain a better insight of the topic that we are about to examine.

Update: The session was recorded. You can either download it as an MP3 Audio file or as an Elluminate recording. Please join us for the live online session on Wednesday May 2 at 1pm Eastern (12CST or check your time zone). The session will be held here in Blackboard Collaborate.

Introduction

This week, I’d like us to think about scholars’ participation and practices online. In this instance, “scholars” refers to individuals who conduct teaching and research in higher education settings (e.g., instructors, professors, MA/PhD students, etc). We will examine this topic by discussing research that I have conducted on the topic, reflecting on our own practice, and synthesizing information already discussed in the #change11 MOOC. We will explore how academics/scholars co-opt and appropriate technology in their day-to-day professional lives, with specific emphasis on social networking technologies. We will discuss faculty members’ experiences and practices when they adopt online social networks (e.g., Twitter) and online scholarly networks (e.g., Academia.edu) for professional purposes, and investigate whether their online participation is (or is not) (re)defining academic work (i.e. teaching and research).

Background

Within the openness movement, we have seen increasing calls for scholars to employ open practices. Such calls are understandable: social technologies such as blogs, social networking sites, and microblogging fora, have the potential to democratize knowledge negotiation and dissemination. My work tries to make sense of what that potential looks like in practice, or what Selwyn and Grant call “state-of-the-actual” versus “state-of-the-art.” For example, to effective participate in social media, and realize the potential for networked learning, we see that individuals may need access to different types of literacies (e.g., see Week 15: Howard Rheingold and Social Media Literacies). It simply is not enough to embrace the technology and expect any real change, without understanding the embedded values of the technology, the beliefs/needs of scholars, and the organizational systems (e.g., universities) which house them. Framing our topic in the context of design-based research (Week 23: Tom Reeves), one could ask: What are the scholarly problems that social media are attempting to solve? Are they a solution to a specific problem? Or are they a solution seeking to find a problem? Ponder these questions for a second. If you look back at the link to the Selwyn & Grant paper above, you will notice that it is posted on Grant’s Academia.edu profile. Has academia.edu (and other similar sites) solved the problem of effortlessly sharing our work? Have they solved the problem of ongoing interaction and negotiation around scholarly artifacts? Or perhaps they allow us to harness the knowledge and skills of colleagues interested in the same topics that we are. There are some great examples of this: When Dave Cormier created a Mendeley Group for Rhizomatic learning, he is attempting to collect “the scant existing publications together into one place;” when Grainne Conole is authoring her book “in the open” (on Cloudwords, her blog, and copies of the document on a shared dropbox folder) she is atempting to gather feedback from others and make her expertise widely available. So. What are the problems? But, also what are the opportunities?   During this particular week, we will consider whether the rise of online social networking within academic circles is a result of technological or cultural shifts, and investigate the purposes, goals, and pitfalls of networked participation.

My work in this domain has started with a desire to understand faculty member’s digital practices. Martin Weller’s research (Week 3: Digital Scholarship) provides the foundations for this investigation. Within this context, I have studied the relationship between scholarly practice and participatory technologies, and sought to understand (a) what faculty members’ do in online social networks, (b) what their experiences in these networks are like, and (c) what issues and pitfalls we might face when suggesting the use of social media for faculty members’ professional practice. This is an important topic of study because (a) digital scholarship is gaining increasing interest, and (b) a large percentage of higher education faculty have adopted, are considering the use of, or have rejected social  technologies for professional practice. Importantly, the field is in dire need of empirical data to be in a position to critically evaluate claims with regards to the benefits that social technologies might afford academic practice.

A critical evaluation of academics’ participation in digital spaces matters because an understanding of these reasons will allow us to gain a better sense of how and why online social networks are used in the ways that they are. Whether we recognize it or not, we are part of a complex techno-cultural system that is ever changing in response to both internal and external stimuli, including technological innovations and dominant cultural values. An understanding of the contemporary forces that shape academic work is necessary for enhancing education and scholarship.

List of Readings (all links will take you to a pdf document)

Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (2012). Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent Techno-Cultural Pressures Toward Open and Digital Scholarship in Online Networks. Computers & Education, 58(2), 766-774.

Veletsianos, G. (2012). Higher Education Scholars’ Participation and Practices on Twitter. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28(4), 336-349.

Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (in press). Scholars and Faculty Members Lived Experiences in Online Social Networks. The Internet and Higher Education.

Suggested Activities

Please feel free to complete any (or all) of the tasks below. Alternatively, create your own activity that will extend your thinking/understanding of the topic.

Task 1: Create a concept map that explains how the topic studied this week relates to and/or contributes to further understanding of the topics studied in preceding weeks.

Task 2: Del.icio.us was described as a place where “links go to die.” Write a blog entry (or create a video narrative or digital story) that reacts to the following statement: “Academia.edu is a place where academic papers go to die” Do you agree or disagree and why?

Task 3: This Google Spreadsheet is an archive of tweets from the recent AERA conference held at Vancouver (archived by Bodong Chen). Look at this data corpus and think about the activity of researchers tweeting while at a conference. What do the tweets tell us about the conference? About the individuals tweeting? What questions come up that we could study further?

Task 4: Write a 1-paragraph research proposal to examine an issue related to this topic. Alert me to it via Twitter (@veletsianos) and I will give you feedback. You should include: A statement of the research problem, a research question, a method of examination/analysis.