We (the AECT Research and Theory Division) are hosting a free webinar focusing on game design for education. Please join us!
Presenter: Dr. Kurt Squire, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Director of the Games, Learning & Society Initiative.
Date: Thursday, October 8, 2015
Time: 1 pm CDT
Registration Link: https://cc.readytalk.com/r/
Crumpled Paper Mario Wallpaper by Tiger Pixel – CC-lcensed
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
Recently, I had the privilege of organizing a workshop for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Athabasca University. The goal was to help the organization work through what they might need to do to put in practice a new strategic plan which calls for student-centered and open digital learning. I used the slides below to assist faculty, instructors, and instructional designers translate theory into practice.
Below are slides from a workshop I gave on the use of social media by academics. During the workshop I described how/why academics use social media and online networks for scholarship, and explored the opportunities and tensions that exist in these spaces. Throughout the workshop, I facilitated small group and large group conversations on this topic based on participant interests. Topic we investigated included social media participation strategies; self-disclosures on social media; capturing and analyzing social media data; ethics of social media research; and social media use for networked learning.
I was at the Emerging Technologies in Authentic Learning Contexts Conference in Cape Town this week, where I gave one of the keynotes. In my talk, I highlighted some of the assumptions of the Educational Technology evangelists and explained how educational technology as an industry departs from educational technology as a field of study. I argued for context-driven innovation, and gave some examples from our current/upcoming research to explain these arguments. My slides are below.
An interesting article this morning from Jeff Young at the Chronicle of Higher Education notes:
One of the obstacles to bringing “adaptive learning” to college classrooms is that professors, administrators, and even those who make adaptive-learning systems don’t always agree on what that buzzword means. That was a major theme of a daylong Adaptive Learning Summit held here on Tuesday. Several people interviewed at the summit, held by the education-innovation group National Education Initiative, noted that part of the problem is a proliferation of companies that make big promises based on making their technologies adaptive, yet all use the term slightly differently.
I would counter that the big (and unsubstantiated) promises are a greater problem than the buzzwords, but the lack of clarity on what these concepts refer to are an issue, too.
The introductory sentences from Online Learning: Emerging Technologies and Emerging Practices (the second edition of the Emerging Technologies in Distance Education book I edited, which is forthcoming in 2016), make a similar argument:
Many of these (new) approaches to education and scholarship can be categorized as either emerging technologies (e.g., automated grading applications within MOOCs) or emerging practices (e.g., sharing instructional materials online under licenses that allow recipients to reuse them freely).
The terms “emerging technologies” and “emerging practices” however, are catchall phrases that are often misused and haphazardly defined. As Siemens (2008, ¶ 1) argues, “terms like ‘emergence,’ ‘adaptive systems,’ ‘self-organizing systems,’ and others are often tossed about with such casualness and authority as to suggest the speaker(s) fully understand what they mean.”
A clearer and more uniform understanding of emergence and of the characteristics of emerging technologies and practices will enable researchers to examine these topics under a common framework and practitioners to better anticipate potential challenges and impacts that may arise from their integration into learning environments.
I’ve received the publisher queries on my book yesterday, and the table of contents has been finalized as below.
I’ve opted for a few first-person narratives, interviews, and descriptions of the habits of academics who use social media in their day-to-day life. One gap in the literature that is becoming increasingly problematic is that researchers are focusing on social media use for scholarship – when social media are intertwined in scholars’ lives in complicated ways. One example is the use of social media for activism and raising awareness (e.g., targeting casualization). A second example is the use of social media to connect with friends and family in social media spaces where colleagues and supervisors are present and figuring out how to navigate the personal-professional tensions that arise as a result of the collapsing contexts.
Social Media in Academia: Networked Scholars
Section |
Title |
Chapter 1 |
Introduction |
Chapter 2 |
Networked Scholarship |
Chapter 3 |
Anna: A Social Media Advocate |
Chapter 4 |
Knowledge Creation and Dissemination |
Chapter 5 |
Realities of Day-to-Day Social Media Use |
Chapter 6 |
Networks of Tension and Conflict |
Chapter 7 |
Nicholas: A Visitor |
Chapter 8 |
Networks of Inequity |
Chapter 9 |
Networks of Disclosure |
Chapter 10 |
Fragmented Networks |
Chapter 11 |
Scholarly Networks / Scholars in Networks |
Chapter 12 |
Conclusion |
References |
References |
Index |
Index |
Spoiler: We’ve been toying with automating the collection of literature on MOOCs (and other topics). Interested? Read further.
Researchers use different ways to keep updated with the literature on a topic. On a daily basis for example, I use Table of Content (TOC) alerts, RSS feeds, and Google Scholar alerts. Many colleagues have sought to keep track of literature on a topic and share it. For example, danah boyd maintained this list of papers on Twitter and microblogging; Tony Bates shared a copy of the MOOC literature he collected on his blog; Katy Jordan also kept a collection of MOOC literature.
A Google Scholar Alert
The problem with maintaining an updated list of relevant literature on a topic is that it quickly becomes a daunting and time-consuming task, especially for popular topics (like MOOCs or social media or teacher training).
In an attempt to automate the collection and sharing of literature, my research team and I created a python script that goes through the Google Scholar alert emails that I receive (see above), parses the content of the emails, and places it in an html page on my server, from where others can access it. The script runs daily and any new literature is added to the page.
We aren’t there just yet, but here is the output for the MOOC literature going back to November 2012. All 400 pages. I placed it in a Google Document because the html file is 2.5mb (and its easier for people to just download it in a format that they prefer)
In theory this is supposed to work quite well, but there’s a couple of problems with it:
We plan on to make the source code available and describe the process to install this so that others can use it for their own literature needs. My question is: How can the output be more helpful to you? Is there anything else that we can do to improve this?
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