Participating in Synchronous Online Education

There is an increasing need for education since the workforce of today is expected to be highly educated and continuously learn. Distance education is a powerful response to meet the growing need for education. Online education, here concisely defined as distance education mediated online, is the most common type of distance education. It mainly relies on asynchronous communication although it is well known that many students regard the lack of synchronous communication as disadvantageous. This thesis aims to achieve a deeper understanding of how, why and when synchronous communication, as a complement to asynchronous communication, affects student participation in online education. In order to study the complex phenomenon of online student participation, various qualitative and quantitative data collection methods for assessing both perceived participation and actual participation were used. The aim was investigated in two offerings of an online undergraduate course and two series of online discussions on master level, and by conducting focus group interviews with experienced practitioners. The findings indicate that synchronous communication has the potential to enhance online student participation. Light was shed on two dimensions of participation, which were labelled personal participation and cognitive participation. The thesis suggests that synchronous communication, as a complement to asynchronous communication, may better support personal participation. This is likely to induce arousal and motivation, and increased convergence on meaning, especially in smaller groups. Synchronous communication seems particularly beneficial for supporting task and social support relations, and to exchange information with a lower degree of complexity. By drawing on the studies of the thesis and previous research, propositions on when to support synchronous communication in online education were suggested

Web Weather 2.0: Improving Weather Information with User-Generated Observations

Introducing web weather 2.0, this paper suggests that active participation by civil society may arise through sharing of environmental data through observations of weather and other measurable variables in the environment performed by individuals. Collecting data from individuals is here suggested for improving weather data currently used by weather research centers and practitioners. Extending these current sets of weather data by using web 2.0 may address some issues stated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) regarding spatial and temporal resolutions of meteorological data including knowledge on different processes between the air and other environmental systems. To test the concept of web weather 2.0, the usability of weather data collected from individuals and the expected quantities of such data need to be determined. In addition, collection methods should be developed. Aiming at the design of an artifact that can meet these needs, this paper presents some important steps of the design process of a “share weather” system, including several demonstrations and experiments performed on different user groups, i.e. school children performing weather observations as a part of their daily tasks and education, and adults interested in weather due to their daily dependence on traffic conditions. This paper provides new knowledge about user-generated observations of weather, including quality and motivation to contribute, and guidance on how future systems for collection of environmental data from individuals may be created. After testing the feasibility of the designed “share weather” artifact, we conclude that the potential role of individuals in producing valuable information beneficial to society should be considered within several branches of environmental sciences as well as policy-making

Эритодермическая форма красного волосяного лишая

ПИТИРИАЗ КРАСНЫЙ ВОЛОСЯНОЙ /диагнлишай красный волосянойЭРИТЕМАКОЖНЫЕ БОЛЕЗНИ ПАПУЛЕЗНО-ЧЕШУЙЧАТЫЕ /диаг

Using Distributed Scrum for Supporting an Online Community: A Qualitative Descriptive Study of Students’ Perceptions

One purpose of higher education is to prepare students for a modern and ever-changing global society characterized by increasing complexity and collaborative environments. Scrum is an agile, widely used framework for project management dealing with the development of complex products. Scrum projects are conducted in small, empowered teams with intense communication, interaction and collaboration between the team members, facilitated by a servant-leader Scrum master. Scrum has been commonly used in professional software development and is also now being adopted in other areas, including education. There have been few studies of the application of Scrum in higher education and very few of them have studied distributed Scrum in an online context. An online learning community has several positive effects for students such as increased learning, engagement, retention and lower risks for isolation and dropouts. Participating in and contributing to a team is dependent on a sense of community, which can be difficult to build up in a distributed environment where members are geographically dispersed and do not have the possibility to meet and communicate face to face. This study examines to what extent and how distributed Scrum can support building an online learning community, from a student perspective. Twenty students, enrolled in an online course in distributed software development, participated in four Scrum projects as members of distributed Scrum teams, each team consisting of five students. Students' perceptions were investigated by conducting semi-structured interviews. The interview transcripts were analyzed according to Rovai's four dimensions of a classroom community. The results indicate that students were very satisfied with their distributed Scrum projects and that they experienced a high degree of flexibility during the projects. The Scrum process promoted and initiated communication and interaction among students and they learned how to communicate and collaborate effectively in an online environment. The transparency in Scrum was perceived as a key factor to open communication and effective collaboration and also contributed to increasing their motivation and engagement in the projects. Another interesting outcome of this study was understanding the importance of creating a team with members who are similar regarding competence level, ambition and preferences in working schedule

“The facts alone will not save us”: A workshop on speculative education future and history making

This workshop aims to explore speculative fiction as a form of educational enquiry and practice. In this pursuit it draws upon the provocative contention of Ruha Benjamin (2016) that “the facts, alone, will not save us.” Instead, she argues, “social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society. Such narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible” (Benjamin, 2016).The ethical implications of educational technologies (EdTech) from simple classroom tools to almighty platforms are raising increasing concerns. These are postdigital concerns insofar as they are inescapable yet also emergent and ongoing. They are amplified by the power and influence of AI (Bozkurt et al, 2023; Cox et al 2023) with its implications for fraud, scams, surveillance, privacy and more fundamentally encodings of privileged norms of race, gender, sexuality, religion and so on. In addition the material and carbon costs of digital learning may force us to reckon with EdTech as inherently ecologically destructive (Selwyn, 2021).Is this to say that all our futures are grim and that hope has been foreclosed? Or if not, how can we work together to plot our way out of these problems? Indeed, would trying to solve all of this too quickly be part of the problem and start another round of techno-solutionism? One approach that has seen increasing attention is the use of storytelling as a sense-making activity that may allow us to first “stay with the trouble” (Harraway, 2020) and describe it, before rushing to the fix. This recent speculative turn has seen educational researchers attempt to cast themselves as writers of fictions that can explore the multitude of interrelated socio-technical issues that are characteristic of complex contemporary networked learning environments (Houlden & Veletsianos, 2023; Hrastinski, 2023; Selwyn et al., 2020; Macgilchrist et al., 2020). It has seen teachers and educators developing or adopting speculative scenarios as tools for students to explore the types of socio-technical entanglements that our world now involves (Krutka et al., 2022).In this workshop participants will co-create speculative fictions that explore hopeful and dystopic possibilities of education. Participants will explore the development of educational fictions based on speculative futuring, of no-yet-ness (Ross, 2017), but also alternative histories that might allow us see the prospective tools of our work, including texts, as neither neutral nor ahistorical. The concept of anti-patterns and deliberately destructive design will be introduced to allow participants to pull on conceptual threads that help unravel education as a relentless and progressive assembly and instead see it as a story that may be unlearned and retold.In summary this workshop provides an invitation to participants to use their deep imaginative capabilities to dream new educational interfaces, via speculative fiction, that allow us to be more awake and alive to ourselves, our students and the communities we serve