Working collaboratively on the digital global frontier

An international online collaborative learning experience was designed and implemented in preservice teacher education classes at the University of Calgary, Canada and the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. The project was designed to give preservice teachers an opportunity to live the experience of being online collaborators investigating real world teaching issues of diversity and inclusivity. Qualitative research was conducted to examine the complexity of the online collaborative experiences of participants. Redmond and Lock’s (2006) flexible online collaborative learning framework was used to explain the design and the implementation of the project. Henri’s (1992) content analysis model for computer-mediated communication was used for the online asynchronous postings and a constant comparative method of data analysis was used in the construction of themes. From the findings, the authors propose recommendations for designing and facilitating collaborative learning on the digital global frontier

COGNITIVE PRESENCE IN PEER FACILITATED ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE DISCUSSION: THE PATTERNS AND HOW TO FACILITATE

This study, in the context of peer-facilitated asynchronous online discussion, explored the characteristics and patterns of students’ cognitive presence, and examined the practices that aim to enhance cognitive presence development. Participants were 53 students from a graduate-level online course that focused on the integration of educational technologies. Data were collected from discussion transcripts, student survey, student artifacts, and researcher’s observations. Results demonstrated four phases of students’ cognitive presence: Triggering event, Exploration, Integration, and Resolution. Among the four phases, students’ cognitive presence tended to aggregate at the middle phases: Integration and Exploration. Percentage of the Resolution was very low. The distribution of students’ discussion behaviors further revealed: a) the hierarchical relationship between the four phases: Integration and Resolution involved a higher-level of cognitive engagement, and Triggering event and Exploration involved a lower-level of cognitive engagement; b) the phase of Resolution heavily relied on experiment, while the other three phases heavily relied on making use of personal experience; c) creating of cognitive presence occurred in both the private space of individual activities and the shared space of having dialogues. The conversation analysis of threads and episodes explored the temporal evolvement of cognitive presence. The results showed that, in an ongoing discussion, students’ cognitive presence evolved in a non-linear way, rather than strictly phase by phase as suggested by the PI model. Experiments were designed and conducted to determine the effects of two pedagogical interventions – 1) providing guidance on peer facilitation techniques; 2) asking students to label their posts. The results showed that the Intervention 1 and the combination of two interventions credibly improved students’ cognitive presence. They were especially effective in improving Integration, a higher level of cognitive presence. After having added Intervention 2, cognitive presence increased from the first-half to the second-half semester, although the improvement was not found to be statistically credible. This study confirmed the close association between and among cognitive presence, social interaction, and peer facilitation. The results clearly showed that Intervention 1 – providing guidance on peer facilitation credibly improved students’ social interaction and peer facilitation. However, Mixed findings were obtained for Intervention 2 – asking students to label their posts. It was found that Intervention 2 positively increased students’ social interaction. However, it did not show any impact on students’ peer facilitation behaviors. It is also worth noting that the effect of the combination of two interventions was much larger than any single one of them. Conversation analysis was conducted to zoom in on the dynamic process of discussion. The cases revealed that when students were provided with the guidance on peer facilitation techniques, they tended to use a variety of facilitation techniques in a strategic way to help peers to achieve a sustained and deeper-level conversation. Compared to the control group, the students in the treatment group showed more peer facilitation behaviors, which led to more conversations and more higher-level cognitive presence. This study has unpacked the complexity of students’ cognitive presence in a peer-facilitated discussion environment, especially when students are coached in performing teaching presence. The results shed light on the pedagogical practices and strategies of creating an online learning community that incubates rich cognitive presence. Finally, implications are discussed for the research and practices in online instruction and discussion analytics

MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses)

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses available to anyone who can sign up. MOOCs provide an affordable and flexible way to learn new skills, advance in careers, and provide quality educational experiences to a certain extent. Millions of people around the world use MOOCs for learning and their reasons are various, including career development, career change, college preparation, supplementary learning, lifelong learning, corporate e-Learning and training, and so on

Bridging the Gap: 21st Century Media Meets Theoretical Pedagogical Literacy Practices

In this chapter, the researchers used an ethnographic stance to demonstrate how conversation evolved within a social media platform. They investigated the online discussions and face-to-face dialogues between teacher educators and pre-service teachers. They compared the participants’ reciprocal conversations within this case study to analyze patterns in the language used in each forum in order to identify the affordances and constraints of perceived understanding. Through this discourse analysis the authors sought to identify indicators of each participant’s metacognitive development while engaging in an online book discussion through a social media platform. Data analysis indicated that there was metacognitive growth when comparing the initial reciprocal conversations with the final conversations

The Affordances of Social Annotation in the Online Writing Classroom: A Community of Inquiry Analysis

Social annotation (SA) is a genre of web-based applications that allow users to annotate texts and to see and respond to annotations others have written. To explore the potential of SA for teaching writing online, findings from twelve empirical studies of SA in education were analyzed through the lens of the Community of Inquiry framework. Results indicate that SA can contribute to cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence in online writing instruction. SA supports collaborative understanding and unpacking of texts. Students can identify and discuss main ideas, claims, rhetorical moves, evidence, etc. They can ask and answer questions. The demands of articulating their views and comparing them to those of others cause students to become aware of their thought processes, a metacognitive development. Pedagogical strategies such as highlighting important concepts and seeding expert annotations can focus attention and scaffold learning. SA can promote the development of community as students collaborate and encourage one another. Teachers can plan and monitor SA activities aligned with learning outcomes. The findings provide insights to guide incorporation of SA in online writing instruction

Facilitating the process of knowledge construction among preservice teachers through computer -mediated communications

This study was concerned with the potential for asynchronous computer-mediated communications (CMC) to facilitate the process of knowledge construction among preservice teachers. Using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study examined the extent to which the CMC among six groups of preservice teachers was influenced by (a) the structure and focus of CMC, and (b) the interactions among peers. Of particular interest was (a) how these factors influenced the depth in cognitive processing that was displayed throughout the course of the semester, and (b) the patterns of social dialogue and interactions that were involved with the displayed levels in cognitive processing. The findings from this study indicated that the structure and focus of CMC did influence the overall learning that occurred. These factors, however, did not influence the levels in cognitive processing that developed throughout the course of the semester. Playing a central role in this process were the interactions among peers that facilitated and prompted cognitively in-depth levels of CMC

Cloud Collaboration: Its Effect toward Writing Achievement and Impact toward Attitude to Learning

The study aims at finding out the effect of cloud collaboration toward writing achievement and students’ perception toward its impact to attitude of English learning. It was an experimental study with pretest-posttest control group design, and the forty-eight samples of which were randomly taken from seventy-nine students taking paragraph writing course. The data were collected using an adapted writing test and cloud service impact questionnaire. The data from the test were analysed using t-test, while the data form questionnaire were descriptively analysed. The results show that there was an increase of writing achievement before and after the treatment and the increase was caused by the cloud collaboration implementation. The results also report that the cloud collaboration implementation had a high positive impact toward students’ confidence, affective engagement and behavioural engagement to English learning, especially in writing course

DOES SCAFFOLDED BLOGGING PROMOTE PRESERVICE TEACHER REFLECTION? EXAMINING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEARNING TOOL AND SCAFFOLDING IN A BLENDED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, School of Education, 2006This study examined the effect of two variables, type of online tool and type of hard scaffolding, on the levels of reflection by preservice teachers. The online tools were a discussion forum and personal weblogs (blogs). The scaffolding types were minimal and enhanced. The participants were forty-eight preservice teachers and their instructor from a course on integrating technology into K-12 environments. The preservice teachers reflected online after watching an online video case study and after planning a lesson that integrated technology. Multiple sources of data were collected and analyzed in order to triangulate findings: the reflective online discourse, two questionnaires, interviews with preservice teachers and the instructor, and observations of classroom and online behavior. Levels of reflection were measured by using a reflection rubric by Hawkes and Romiszowski (2001) and a reflection scale by Crotty and Allyn (2001). The results revealed that enhanced scaffolding had a statistically significant effect on promoting higher levels of reflection over minimal scaffolding. This was because the guiding questions in the enhanced scaffold provided structure and focus as well as an expert practitioner's perspective on technology integration. The type of online tool did not have a statistically significant effect on promoting higher levels of reflection. Results suggest that this was due to the different personal preferences of the preservice teachers and their perceived affordances of the online tools. This study suggests that the nature of scaffolding has a more critical role in promoting reflection than the technical affordances of the online tool. In addition, as a result of the computer-mediated discourse analysis, this study suggests a modified method of measuring reflection

Role taking and knowledge building in a blended university course

Role taking is an established approach for promoting social cognition. Playing a specific role within a group could lead students to exercise collective cognitive responsibility for collaborative knowledge building. Two studies explored the relationship of role taking to participation in a blended university course. Students participated in the same knowledge-building activity over three consecutive, five-week modules and enacted four roles designed in alignment with knowledge building pedagogy (Scardamalia and Bereiter 2010). In Study 1, 59 students were distributed into groups with two conditions: students who took a role in Module 2 and students who did not take a role, using Module 1 and 3 as pre and post tests. Results showed no differences in participation in Module 1, higher levels of writing and reading for role takers in Module 2, and this pattern was sustained in Module 3. Students with the Synthesizer role were the most active in terms of writing and the second most active for reading; students with the Social Tutor role were the most active for reading. In Study 2, 143 students were divided into groups with two conditions: students who took a role in Module 1 and students who did not take a role. Content analysis revealed that role takers tended to vary their contributions more than non-role takers by proposing more problems, synthesizing the discourse, reflecting on the process and organization of activity. They also assumed appropriate responsibilities for their role: the Skeptic prioritizes questioning of content, the Synthesizer emphasizes synthesizing of content, and the Social Tutor privileges maintaining of relationships. Implications of designing role taking to foster knowledge building in university blended courses are discussed