My Work – Page 14 – Virtual Canuck

Big New Issue of IRRODL now available

December 8, 2007Written by terrya

It was really nice to see a big issue of International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning IRRODL hit the cyberstreet this week. As I am on sabbatical this year, I manged to get my colleague Heather Kanuka to guest edit this issue. Unlike paper journals we are not as constrained by publication economics and so managed to provide a large issue with 9 main articles, 3 ‘research notes” 2 book reviews and links to 9 CIDER sessions via Elluminate. Also of interest to our African colleagues we have issued a special
Call for Proposals ~ Trends and Issues in Open and Distance Learning in Africa
Co-editors: Dr. Rashid Aderinoye and Dr. Richard Siaciwena

Each article in IRRODL is provided in HTML, PDF and MP3. Curt Bonk writes in Hearing your words via computer: Podcasted research is a whole new teaching tool! about the value of the MP3 files. He also provides a list of potential learning activities for the audio files of the articles. I’m sure both Curt, myself and others are interested in hearing of ways in which you find the MP3 files of use (please add a comment to this post). These files are created semi-automatically using commercial text to speech tools. For a quick preview of the quality of the transcription and voice, here is the link to the abstract of Davide Annand’s interesting article Re-organizing universities for the Information Age

Distance Education, My Work

Ego, object-centric or adhoc educational social software?

November 28, 2007Written by terrya

3 Comments

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

Distance Education, educational social software, My Work

One Small Step for Athabasca University

November 27, 2006Written by terrya

3 Comments

After seemingly endless debates and multiple committees, I was very pleased to see Athabasca University‘s Academic Council approve a new policy on Open Access to scholarly publications produced by AU faculty and professional staff. Read More

Distance Education, My Work

Wiki as conference evaluation tool

June 2, 2006Written by terrya

We sponsored a full day PreConference workshop on Distance Education Research sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research CIDER at the Canadian Association for Distance Education (CADE) and AMTEC conference held last week in Montreal. Most of the presentations are online at the CIDER site, but I wanted to discuss the use of PBWIKI to facilitate the workshop participant evaluation.

Unlike like a good adult educator, I had not gotten my act together to create and photocopy the traditional exit survey. However, I did have the email addresses of the registered participants, so I very quickly (maybe 20 minutes max.) set up a site (cidereval.pbwiki.com) at the free PBWIKI site and typed in 4 questions (the usual, what did you like, best, least, suggestions for next year) and invited reflection on the use of the WIKI for this evaluation.

I chose to make the site visible to others (check it out) but restricted editing capabilitity to those who had participated in the workshop. We had a very small learning curve as we learned (thanks Elizabeth Murphy) to place a line with single space between comments. This allowed each unique comment to each question to appear in a separate text book- looks very smart.

There are three obvious advantages to using a WIKI for this purpose.

Ease of creation and administration, lack of cost and saving of trees
Using the WIKI benefits not just the organizers, but the participants as well. Everyone gets to read the reactions of others and comment on them. The visibility allows participants to gauge their perceptions against those of others. This auto validation serves to enhance the reflective nature of the evaluation, forcing participants to not only present their own reactions but judge those reactions in comparison to those of others – questioning any discreancies.
Finally, the process is efficient for all participants as they don’t need to write what has already been posted, but rather can expand, contrast, discuss or illustrate thier own perceptions.

Of course I didn’t get the usual means from Likert scales assessing each presentation nor a sense of how many people actually edited or just read the evaluations, but that data seems to not really add much value to my plans for enhancing next year’s conference.

So the ease of use, extremely low cost (thanks PKWIKI) coupled with metacognitive nature of the reflection seems to make WIKI’s a very useful tool for this application.

My Work