Category: Distance Education

The latest issue of EduCause Review headlines an article Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit by George Siemen, Peter Tittenberger and myself. The work is mostly George’s but I was happy to play a supportive role in its production and editing. The article does a good job of overviewing the ‘augmented’ use of network technologies in F2F conferences, use in blended f2F and online conferences and those virtual conferences that are hosted entirely online.

One can’t help but notice the demand for (and extensive use of) wireless connectivity by delegates at face to face conferences these days. Of course, too much of this activity (especially emails) likely situates delegates (virtually) back at home and likely the F2F session suffers from contention for attention. However, we highlight in the article means such as blogging, IMs, audience question possing and polling that can be used to focus and enhance interaction even during F2F conferences. The article also describes ways in which the net is used in blended fashion to support learning before and after the conference.

But of greatest interest in the article (to me) is the overview, examples and (limited) evaluation data from conferences that run completely online. The growing awareness of the ecological and financial cost of travel, coupled with the opportunity cost associated with spending days away from home and workplace, make completely online conferences increasingly attractive. This article is chocked full of links and provides a good discussion of the techniques, benefits and challenges of using net technology to enhance professional development conferences.

Well worth a read, but then I’m biased!!!!

Terry

With all the buzz about blended learning coming from our campus based colleagues, it got me thinking about the value of “blended learning” in distance and online courses. I realize that there are a number of different ideas and “blends” associated with the term ‘blended learning’, but it seems the common institutional and educational use is to describe blending online and Face-to-Face(F2F) education programming. What strikes me as especially salient is the blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning activities and opportunities. The increase in availability, coupled with reduction in cost for online forms of synchronous (audio, video, text and immersive) conferencing, got me thinking. Maybe what is critical in the F2F experience is the immediacy and social presence associated more with synchronous activities than with the face-to-face, body language enhanced gathering. And maybe this provides a promising theoretical rationale for 0nline blended learning.
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In a very interesting post titled Social Network Transitions, Fred Stutzman discusses the often lemming-like move of the masses from one social site to another. Of particular interest is Fred’s distinction between between object and ego based social software sites. Fred writes “An ego-centric social network places the individual as the core of the network experience (Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster) while the object-centric network places a non-ego element at the center of the network” (Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us etc.).

In our attempt to design and build education social software sites to support distance education students, I wonder what combination of ego-centric versus object-centered site is most appropriate? Obviously artifacts created during learning activities are important components of any educational social software (ESS) application. Thus, the capability to upload, share, version, collaboratively edit, and add multimedia to documents is critical and aligns our needs with other object-centric network sites. The most prominent of these artifacts will likely be the e-portfolio, in which learners aggregate, synthesize and reflect upon their learning. Like other object sites, ESS should allow the owner to set access and edit rights to the objects that they wish to display in their personal network space at the site. These rights should be categorized such that classes of people (those enrolled in the same course, friends, the wide open net and even personally defined classes such as “my relatives”) can easily be created, managed and assigned to indovidual and sets of learning artifacts. In fact the object-centered collections already owned by learners, such as lists of favorite references (CiteULike) should be easily linked to and manipulated within ESS applications.Read More