Community of Leaners

In my face to face classes, I have always designed instruction that included cooperative learning, jigsaw activities and group presentations. While working collaboratively, teacher candidates are building a sense of community that provides a model of best practices. In the online environment, the literature suggests that one of the major drawbacks is that students feel isolated as it relates to learning communities. In an attempt to provide a greater level of collaboration in the online environment, I structure multiple learning teams. Within the teams, the students are provided a weekly topic to facilitate and then interact with their peers on the weekly content. In facilitating these e-discussions, students are developing a greater level of understanding about a given topic and are also provided meaningful interaction with both the instructor and their peers.


In your experience, what online instructional design techniques are most effective for creating a greater sense of community among the students?

Joy

TekFest - Review of Facebook.com

Greetings Everyone,

As part of TekFest 2008, I am posting a review of Facebook.com which is a wildly popular social software application. My review is posted below. In addition, you’ll find a brief presentation further examining the features and limitations of Facebook.com as well as how it can support 21st century online learners. Finally, you’ll find a podcast interview with Professor Joan Leitchter Dominick who was an early adopter of Facebook.com and uses it as a way to support and keep in touch with students. I look forward to your comments and discussions.

Facebook.com enables people to connect with others who work, study, or live around them (2008). People of all ages use social networking sites such as Facebook.com to keep up to date with friends, family and co-workers by sharing links, photos, and information about themselves and their lives. Features of Facebook.com incorporates many of the Web 2.0 tools such as blogging features, photo sharing, news feeds to track changes to pages, instant messaging and chat, as well as a marketplace which allows users to post free classified ads. In 2007, Facebook.com launched Facebook for iPhone and in less than 1 year, there are 1.5 million active users (Facebook.com, 2008). This level of popularity clearly indicates that people want to utilize technology to support socialization.

Due to the integrated features offered through Facebook.com to keep members connected, it remains a wildly popular site. In fact, Facebook.com is the 6th most trafficked website in the world and the 2nd most trafficked social media site in the world. But according to Comscore, Facebook.com hosts the number 1 photo sharing application in the world with more than 14 million photos uploaded daily (Comscore, 2007).

However, the use of social software sites such as Facebook.com have come under fire in recent years by concerned parents and activists who are concerned about the ability to keep inappropriate material out of the hands of minors and about access such sites offer for internet predators.

Learning in the 21st century is shifting from a constructivist pedagogy to a connectivist pedagogy with the explosion of social networking tools such as Facebook.com that are currently available. McLoughlin & Lee argue that such tools including social networking spaces can “support and encourage informal conversation, dialogue, collaborative content generation, and knowledge sharing, giving learners access to a wide range of ideas and representations” (2008, ¶4). Isn’t this level of higher order thinking what we expect from our learners?

Using Social Software in Online Learning - TekFest 2008 Presentation

Podcast Interview about Facebook.com

Polldaddy Question

I'd like to experiment with this application a bit more to see if I can use it to get real time information about student learning in the online environment. For this first activity, I just created a 1 question poll to explore the usefulness of the interactivities I've created for my educational research course.

The poll I created is available on my backdoor course resources site near the bottom. NOTE: I just this as a holding place for resources I link in Vista...

http://www.funkphd.net/7741/
Have a good one!
Leigh

Impressions of Raptivity

Hi Everyone,
I hope you all enjoyed the July 4th holiday! I really liked exploring Raptivity and think it has great potential to enhance the interactivity and reinforcement activities for online courses. I created an interaction for my graduate Educational Research course to reinforce their understanding of the characteristics of quantitative and qualitative research. I used the Classification Exercise with Timed Options interaction for this activity. While I liked the numerous choices available in Raptivity, I found the limitations on character length and the navigation options to be limiting. For example, I wanted students to be able to re-stat the activity, but didn't see a way to offer a link to re-start the game once it ended.

Again, I like all the options for interactions, but for free, HotPotato does at least 4 of these basic designs. I agree, I would have a hard time justifying this $1000 expense to my department chair. But I really appreciate the opportunity to test out this software and learn more about the types of interactivities that are available.

My interaction is available at:
http://www.funkphd.net/7741/characteristics_raptivity.int/Publish/JavaScript_Publish/characteristics_raptivity.int.swf
I need to play around with better file names in my URL, but I was afraid to mess with any of the stored file within the raptivity generated folder :-).
Have a great week!
Leigh

Gabcast Assignment

Hi Everyone,
Although I completed the Gabcast assignment during our Module 3, I apparently forgot to post it to my blog. I think I must have been traumatized by that point, but I'm getting my feet back on track now :-).


Gabcast! PlugN2Learn #1

Leigh's Screen Capture Assignment

Hi Everyone,I really struggled with this assignment. Apparently, the newest versions of RealPlayer, Windows Media Player & Quicktime don't seem to have this feature, or at least I could not translate the instructions from our course to any way relate to the versions of the software I had. So, I downloaded a piece of software that would just let me take a picture while playing a paused video. I don't think this should have been a 1 hour task or nearly this hard so if anyone knows what I'm missing please let me know ;-).Anyway, here is my still photo from a video...

Dr. Funk's Top 5 List - Video Podcast

Hi Everyone,

I must say, I've never spent Mother's Day learning new technologies, but after 7 hours of "sandbox" time today, this was quite an enjoyable day. I decided to expand on last week's lesson about podcasting this week as we explore creating online videos. I hope this is an acceptable application for this week's project.

Before today, I had never even been the one behind the camera taking video. But with a few words of encouragement from husband, away I went. After reviewing audio and video podcasts in our last module, I decided I wanted to create video podcasts as part of my hybrid Educational Research course this summer. So, today, I created a brief video introducing myself and a new feature for the course - Dr. Funk's Top 5 List. I will produce a video podcast each week highlighting the 5 most important concepts from the week's content.

After many tries, I finally managed to create the video, edit the video, save it into the correct format, publish it to iTunes and view it on my iPod. For me, this was quite an accomplishment!

If you'd like to view Dr. Funk's Top 5 List - Educational Research Episode 1, it is available in iTunes or you may wish to view it online at:
http://funkphd.podbean.com/


Happy Mother's Day Everyone!
Leigh

I'm testing compatibility so in addition to the direct link above, I'm embedding the video in this post to see that works.