Making a difference

Many times I've heard it said that there is no evidence that technology improves learning. This is a vacuous claim, based on ignorance of the research literature, and possibly borne out of a fear or dislike of technology in general. My usual retort to such a claim is that children with special educational needs are a classic example of technology improving learning. For children with special needs, especially those with physical disabilities such as deafness or vision impairment, technology not only improves learning, it actually enables learning. Without adaptive technology, many disabled children could not access certain types of education. But there is a mass of evidence to show that technology is not only making the difference for all learners, it is actually creating new and previously unattainable opportunities for learning. Technology does make a difference.

A recent research study at the Durham University in the North East of England suggests that multi-touch, multi-user surfaces can improve the learning of mathematics. 400 children were involved in the study, which demonstrated that 'smart tables' enabled better collaboration and problem solving during maths lessons. Class teachers receive a live feed of output from the children's interactions on the surface, and can intervene when necessary. Research has shown that the touch surfaces enable children to discover a range of alternative solutions to maths problems, simply through interacting with each other in new ways.

Image source


Making a difference by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Interactions of the fourth kind

Interaction. For many teachers, it has become the keystone of contemporary education. Many studies into the importance of interaction in education have been conducted. We all have different definitions of what interaction involves, but most of us agree - it's an important component of learning. According to theorist Michael G. Moore, there are three types of interaction. In an editorial piece in the American Journal of Distance Education in 1989 Moore outlined his three levels. The first, learner-teacher, is the most likely kind of interaction to be found in traditional classroom settings, but with the age of social media and other forms of digitally mediated communication, interaction can now be just as rich an experience when conducted at a distance.

The second type of interaction, according to Moore, is the learner-learner kind. Generally, this kind of interaction can be seen in the informal conversations that take place outside the classroom, in the common room, at the pub, waiting for the bus home. And yet, in formal learning settings,  learner-learner interaction can be used as a valuable pedagogical technique to encourage free thinking, deeper engagement with the topic, debate and discursive activities, collaborative learning and much more.

Moore's third kind of interaction is learner-content. This is probably the least formal of the interactions in terms of its place in the classroom. Although some learner-content interaction can be observed, with the momentum now toward more discussion, project work and collaborative learning within the classroom, student-content interaction is more likely to occur outside the classroom, at home, at work, on journeys. 

In 1994, Hillman, Willis and Gunawardena suggested a fourth kind of interaction - student-interface. In the digital age, this is the first point of contact between students and all other kinds of interaction. Students now interact more or less continually with their peers, their tutors. The article called for "design strategies that facilitate students' acquisition of the skills needed to participate effectively in the electronic classroom". Hillman et al hit the nail on the head 18 years ago, as new computer systems emerged. Even more than ever, in the age of new handheld devices, wearable computing and natural gesture technology, we need even more effort put into understanding how learners interact with their tools and technologies.

How for example, might students learn differently using touch surfaces such as the iPad, when compared to non-touch devices such as the X-Box 360 Kinect? There is discussion about the advantages of game playing using haptic perception (sense of resistance and tactile feedback) devices such as the Nintendo Wii handset over powerful gestural but non-touch controlled interfaces. What about the several human senses that are brought into play when such tools are used? What can we learn about ourselves and our environments when proprioception (the relative position of our limbs and body in relation to each other) and equilibrioception (the sense of body movement, balance and acceleration) are called into use? For a long time we have focused on the main senses (audio and visual, and to a lesser extent kinaesthetic) at the expense of the many other human senses, but with new technologies increasingly available for learning, it is now time to study the effects of the fourth kind of interaction in greater detail.

Image by Alvaro Canivell

References

Hillman, D.C.A., Willis, D.J. and Gunawardena, C. N. (1994) Learner interface interaction in distance education: An extension of contemporary models and strategies for practitioners. The American Journal of Distance Education, 8 (2), 30-42.

Moore, M. G. (1989) Editorial: Three types of interaction. The American Journal of Distance Education, 3 (2), 1-6.


Interactions of the fourth kind by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Wikis in eLearning 2.0

The latest issue of the journal Interactive Learning Environments is a special issue entitled: Towards eLearning 2.0 University, and is guest edited by Adriana Berlanga, Francisco Garcia Penalvo and Peter Sloep. When I first saw this proposal I was immediately enthusiastic and it didn't take long for Joe Psotka (my co-editor) and I, to commission it. Now the three have brought the issue to fruition, and an excellent one it is, exactly as I anticipated. The seven papers and editorial focus on how Web 2.0 social media can, and are being used to enhance, extend and enrich learning in higher education. It's dedicated to the question of how universities are integrating social media into academic practice, with the aim to foster eLearning 2.0 - where the student is placed at the centre of a more social, personal and flexible learning process. I'm impressed by the scope and scale of the projects in this issue.

The first paper, by Lim et al, focuses on new digital literacies and asks whether social practices are lagging behind expectations. There follows an erudite explanation of socio-techno-spatial relationships, where learners shift their dependence away from their tutors to their peers, and where teachers in turn have to learn new pedagogical practices to keep up with the changes taking place.

Another stand out paper in the issue is an exploration by Karasavvides of the use of wikis in higher education, and the attendant barriers and difficulties that need to be overcome for full acceptance and embedding into the learning process. The author identifies seven types of problems from a recent wiki study, including time management, student resistance, plagiarism and lack of collaboration.

Similar findings are presented by Huang and Nakazawa in their paper entitled: An empirical analysis on how learners interact in wiki in a graduate level online course. The study investigated how learners initiate and manage learning activities in wiki environments, and predictably, discovered a significant qualitative difference between learner-learner and learner-tutor interactions. Students clearly interacted more with their peers, leading to speculation on what role tutors should adopt in such learning environments. Students also encountered the problem of losing momentum because they could perceive no actual ending point to their assignment. The authors call for further research to be conducted into that quality of interaction within wiki type learning environments.

More from this issue tomorrow.


Wikis in eLearning 2.0 by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A balancing act

In two previous posts this week I tried to identify some of the reasons why students fail to engage in collaborative online learning environments, and also tried to suggest some possible solutions to the problem of social loafing. I thought Dean Groom's response - Why aren't they doing anything? - yesterday was particularly useful because it highlighted that there are differences between engagement in formal learning environments and informal environments such as massive multiplayer online games. I agree and suggest that it must be to do with different kinds of motivation. MMORPGS are designed with massive participation in mind and are usually more fun. Today I want to talk about some of the ways online groups work together.

Some previous research can shed light on these issues. In 1994 McGrath and Hollingshead showed that groups interacting using technology tend to take on specific roles within the group, and this often occurs spontaneously. They quote the theory of TIP (time, interaction and performance) which regards groups operating continuously and simultaneously within the three separate functions of production, member support and group well-being. There are in fact three types of support required by online learners (Carnwell, 1999). They are academic support, emotional and social support and technical support. I have observed with my own student groups that the last two are often taken care of by the members of the group themselves. It's the first one that is the sole preserve of the e-tutor.

Palloff and Pratt (1999) discovered that in many of their online student groups, individual learners emerged to take on specific roles in the support and group well-being functions, such as 'encourager', and conflict 'mediator'. They also saw that there are students who take it upon themselves to chase up other students when they have not been seen participating for a while in the online group discussions (akin to the student self-policing I mentioned yesterday). It would be interesting to discover whether such students would also adopt similar roles in a conventional classroom setting, but Palloff and Pratt offer no information on this. They do however, comment that the emergence of these roles is a strong indicator that community is forming within the online community, and that this mirrors the processes that occur in traditional community settings.

It's often the case that online environments mirror what happens in the real world. Online tutors often find themselves in a fine balancing act - they should be aware of these issues, intervening when necessary, but knowing when to step back so that the virtual group can self-regulate.

References

Carnwell, R. (1999) Distance education and the need for dialogue. Open Learning, 14 (1), 50-55.

McGrath, J. E. and Hollingshead, A. B. (1994) Groups Interacting with Technology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Palloff, R. M. and Pratt, K. (1999) Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Image source

Twittering about - part 2

Here's the continuation of the report on my recent survey on about Twitter uses. I asked people what their top three reasons were for using Twitter. Yesterday's post carried some of the responses, and here are the rest. If you use Twitter yourself you may follow some of these notorious microbloggers....

@cristinacost (Cristina Costa, England) uses Twitter because she gets useful links and connections, meets great people and indulges in a 'bit of chatter.' She says it is also important to have fun when using Twitter. @vaughany (Paul Vaughan, England) says it's all about the networking, conversation and distraction. @Pettsvaldo (Kristian Petterson, England) uses Twitter to get help from his peers, for amusement and to gain access to 'the most contemporaneous news one can get'. @karynromeis (Karyn Romeis, England) locks into a network of likeminded individuals, gets links to interesting things she might otherwise have missed and uses Twitter to make up for the loss of office chatter since she 'went solo'. @andypiper (Andy Piper, England) likes keeping up with news, enjoys the ambient intimacy and says that Twitter gives him awareness of his friends, and helps him extend his network.

Downunder, @suewaters (Sue Waters, Australia) says she enjoys near instantaneous connections with extremely diverse groups of people who willingly help and share, and likes the ability of Twitter to provide quick help and assistance to others and similarly receive, increased ability to achieve deeper personal connection to people in your PLN compared to normal blogging. @ljloeffler (Louis Loeffler, USA) says it is easy to discover new Web 2.0 ideas, network and meet, improve and learn. And there's more...

@SarahStewart (Sarah Stewart, New Zealand) says access to broad range of info and people is important as is access to synchronous and serendipitous events. She says that Twitter gives her more of a personal insight into the people she follow through blogs. @ctscho (Carmen Tschofen, USA) says she appreciates Twitter's constant flow of excellent links, a sense of the exchange of dynamics among like thinkers and thinks that it is an excellent place for interaction for introverts. @Quinnovator (Clark Quinn, USA) likes to track what is going on, obtains responses to questions and issues he poses and finds Twitter useful to interact with his colleagues.

@MtnLaurel (Laura Little, USA) finds Twitter useful to connect with her colleagues too, discovers local information, and can share her knowledge and experience within a community of interest. Finally, @torresk (Ricardo Torres Compen, Spain) uses Twitter as a pedagogical tool to support his students and promote discussion. He uses it to keep up-to-date and for networking with colleagues.

Bearing in mind that only 22 people responded to the survey, it would be foolish to make generalisations from such a small sample and this is merely a snapshot of current uses. However, I hope that you can appreciate that trends are indicated here, even in such a superficial study. Statistics are calculated on the basis that each respondent had 3 reasons to give and that each reason was placed into categories as follows: Social interaction/maintaining network, Sharing own knowledge, Entertainment and fun, Getting responses to questions, Finding new links and information, Immediacy, and 'Other'. Percentages were calculated from each column based on the sum divided by 22. I didn't perform any inferential statistics due to the small sample, but there is scope for a larger study.

By far the most important reason for using Twitter was to maintain social and professional network of contacts (82%). This was followed closely by the desire to keep up to date with new trends and technologies (72%). 32% used Twitter as a means of entertainment and fun. It's obvious that Twitter is being used to connect and engage, but interestingly, only 2 respondents (9%) used it to 'share their own knowledge'. I suspect more actually do this, but didn't report it (I follow them all and often learn from their twittering). All in some way or another wanted to keep in contact with their colleagues and peers, and wanted contact with those working in the same area of interest, and to maintain their networks. Twitter then, is seen by users as a multi-purpose social networking tool which has possibilities at several levels. No wonder it is growing exponentially, possibly at the expense of other Web 2.0 tools. As always, any comments are welcome. (Image source: Cyndygreen.wordpress.com)

YZ on young shoulders....

It's been an interesting and busy week teaching here at the Technical University of Liberec, in the northern Czech Republic. Everything is different here to the UK including, mercifully, the weather (a balmy 28 degrees today). I need to be particularly careful with the keyboard I am using as it has transposed 'y' and 'z' keys. Cognitive load is more excessive than usual....

I have just finished a week teaching 20 German, Czech, Polish, and for the first time, Nigerian students. They are all very young and very enthusiastic and have been asking lots of questions, which makes my job easier, and paradoxically, harder. We have studied the psychology of interpersonal communication, with a section on Internet communication. I created a wiki for them on the spot, which you can visit at this link. It will be interesting to see if there are any cultural variations in the postings and discussions that take place.

Next week I'm back in dear old blighty, and then off to Napoli, Italy to present a paper at the EDEN conference. More later - now I'm off to let my hair down a little, before I catch my flight... Nashledanou....

Text Mex

A recently published article in Interactive Learning Environments entitled 'Use of Instant Messaging in Online Learning Environments' [14 (3), 205-218] suggests that Instant Messaging is even better for students than face to face communication. The authors, Juan Contreras-Castrillo et al, give a Mexican perspective on the use of this technology, and eulogise about how good it is, at least for their sample of 43 students and 4 teachers.

It seems that remote students gave the teacher a 'virtual apple' in the form of welcoming messages, which the authors claim helped to establish a 'better social presence'. Students tended to use IM for low level stuff like superfluous chatting rather than about the course. It's a kind of passing paper messages around type of use by the sounds of it. The authors conclude by claiming that the use of IM 'increases students's satisfaction by providing continuous opportunities for interaction with the teacher and classmates'.

Not on weekends it doesn't (I hope). Sounds like a flaming nightmare for teachers who enjoy a little time off from the trials and tribs of the classroom, virtual or otherwise....