Rebecca's Research Blog

Juxtaposing the personal and the institutional: how, where, when and why do undergraduate students communicate and collaborate online? Sue Timmis, S Barnes and James Gilligan, University of the West of England
http://wun.ac.uk/view.php?id=220 (contact rather than web link)

Sue and the others had used activity theory to look at how undergraduates communicate online. They found a disconnection between the active communication observed in under 25s, and the lack of participation in online learning communities amongst undergraduates.

I liked their partnership-based research design, which seems to tie in with PeterT’s SecondLife research. Students were co-researchers who collected and generated a range of data and comments on analysis and findings. Students collected their own electronic messages, researcher gathered VLE data, student-led and videoed interview, pre-interview questionnaire and a set of stimulus questions.

Sue reported that the introduction of the university’s VLE had been disruptive to their communities based on Yahoo groups. They moved to use Blackboard, but found that students did not check their Blackboard email.

The undergraduates fell into two camps. They were either frequent mobile users or frequent MSN and other chat users. Economic factors, including mobile phone package, affected their choice.

Students wanted to work with their friends. They did not feel connected to other people in the group and found it difficult to collaborate with people that they didn’t know. This finding contrasts with the findings of Tim Savage’s paper (see last post), strengthening his argument that it was the blended nature of the community which made it so strong.

Emergence v design – a case study of an emergent community of practice in a blended learning community in postgraduate education Tim Savage, Trinity College, Dublin. https://www.cs.tcd.ie/Tim.Savage/scholar.htm

Once again, very relevant to me. I’m particularly interested in the idea of a blended community which brings together the online and the F2F, strengthening both.

Tim used an ethnographic approach and grounded theory to study a supportive online community which runs alongside a course and has done for five years. He looked at the differences between the design space and the community which emerges. He also looked at the processes of emergence – the impact of the online F2F blend.

The emergent community is neither face to face nor virtual. It is  community with aspects of both. There was recognition of people’s online persona prior to F2F contact. The blended approach seemed to bring together a community more quickly than either an online or a F2F community would manage. People felt there was a lack of cliques. They had a sense of pride in the community. In-class groupings were more fluid than would have been expected if they had been based only on F2F contact. Cliques teded to exist only when people had met on previous courses. There was a strong commitment to the community a well as to the personal social network.

OK – biting the bullet. I CAN read through my conference notes. I DO want to blog about this – especially the first presentation, which was so relevant to my work. 

Taking a stance: promoting deliberate action through online postgraduate professional development Peter Kelly, K Gale, S Wheeler and V Tucker, University of Plymouth
See also: Kelly, Peter (2006) What is teacher learning? A socio-cultural perspective. Oxford Review of Education 32 (4)

Peter distributed a draft copy of the related research paper. This has an excellent bibliography, which is really relevant to me. All the right keywords: asynchronous written discourse, identity exploration, online community of practice… 

He has carried out six case studies in an online community of prractice related to an education MA. The students were able to immerse themselves in problems brought to the comunity by their tutor (I’m not sure I’d relish the opportunity to immerse myself in problems 🙂  ) Peter explores the success of the community in supporting identity exploration and transformation. participants describe tensions between their professional identities and the identities ascribed to them by their professional circumstances.

There is an interesting section on the key role writing plays in promoting and developing lifelong professional learning, which we should reference in our blogging article.

The paper focuses on three areas:

1 the influence of their relationship to the technology on students’ participation in the online  community
2 identity exploration and change
3 The quality of the asynchronous written dialogue.

I can usually blog at the drop of a hat. It’s a great displacement activity, which I can just about claim is work. So why have I been sitting here all day, failing to blog about the sessions I went to at the CAL conference?

So, what did I go to?
Monday Noon-1pm
Taking a stance: promoting deliberate action through online postgraduate professional development Peter Kelly, K Gale, S Wheeler and V Tucker, University of Plymouth
Emergence v design – a case study of an emergent community of practice in a blended learning community in postgraduate education Tim Savage, Trinity College, Dublin
Juxtaposing the personal and the institutional: how, where, when and why do undergraduate students communicate and collaborate online? Sue Timmis, S Barnes and James Gilligan, University of the West of England
Monday 2.30-3.30pm
Content analysis of computer conferencing transcripts – which one should I use? Roisin Donnelly, B Holmes, J Gardner
Mathematical discourse and new media Morten Misfeldt, Danish University of Education
Creativity and collaboration in professional learning communities: some transformative approaches Madeleine Sclater, V Lally
Monday 4pm-5.20pm
Teaching and learning ethics online: lessons from the BioEthics project Linda Baggott le Velle, J Wishart, D Green, A McFarlane, University of Bristol
How do we know if students are learning in Moodle Forums? Claire McAvinia, J Keating, National University of Ireland
The disruptive nature of technology in my own learning Julie Allen, Dublin City University
Student and tutor voices in online learning: celebrating individual disruption while debating structural disruption Maggie Hutchings, University of Bournemouth

Tuesday 10am-11am
How can technology be used for creative expression and learning through pedagogies of the unique and webs of betweenness? Margaret Farren, J Whitehead, Y Crotty
Using serious games for learning in higher education – ‘False Dawn’ or untapped resource? Pauline Roney, Dublin Institute of Technology
Enforced disruption in the use of blogs for sepecific purposes: creative expression, reflection and language learning Liam Murray, Trion Hourigan, University of Limerick
Tuesday 11.30am-12.30pm
Emotions and online activities Kim Issroff
Productive learning supported by ICT – a way of overcoming the grammar of schooling? Berthel Sutter, M Nilsson, B Stille, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Creating and evaluating an online community to assist with curriculum reform Colette Murphy, K Carlisle, J Beggs
Tuesday 2pm-3.30pm
Informal science learning with GPS-enabled PDAs Gill Clough
Handhelds vs teachers and other clashes in the classroom Jocelyn Wishart, Angela McFarlane, University of Bristol
Where is the m in skills for life? Bob Harrison, Toshiba Information Systems UK

Wednesday 9am-10am
Following the actors and the avatars of massively multi-user online role-playing games Sisse Siggaard Jensen, Roskilde University, Denmark
‘MobiMissions’: a locative, mobile and collaborative game using cellular networks Lyndsay Grant, S Benford
Sketch-based interfaces to support collaborative conceptual design learning Phebe Mann
Wednesday 10am-11am
Technology: empowering the educational researcher through remote observation Anesa Hosein
Big Brother in the classroom? The use of cameras as communication not surveillance technology Martin Dyke, Alan Harding, University of Southampton
Is there ‘no life’ in Second Life? (Exploring the educational affordance in synthetic worlds) Paul Hollins, University of Bolton
Wednesday 11.30am-12.15pm
Opening up for openlearn: issues in providing open educational resources Andreia
Adapting, adopting and analysing the potential of open educational resources Tina Wilson

I would have preferred to blog about CAL as it was in progress, but the 20-minute slots were not ideal for reflection – they often seemed like a breakneck rush through the subject, sometimes with no time for questions. When I didn’t want to stick with the same strand for an hour, they meant packing up, slipping out and rushing to another lecture theatre; often missing the first couple of slides.

Between sessions there was little chance for blogging, as the coffee breaks were also poster sessions, so I had to be on hand by a poster on both days. Lunchbreaks were short, and I had to rush back to my poster.

In addition, there were no facilities for plugging in and recharging laptops – which meant computer time had to be rationed to avoid running out of power for the afternoon’s strands. Oh, and there was no chat / coffee / break area where you could sit, skip a session and blog.

All in all, then, this was not a conference which encouraged blogging. Gill http://conclave.open.ac.uk/acablog/ and I managed some sketchy live blogging with photos, but more to see if this was possible than to produce lucid and thoughtful notes.

Ira Socol managed some more coherent blogging during the conference http://speedchange.blogspot.com

Jin Tan from the University of Sheffield presented a poster on blogging, and she has since blogged about CAL http://jin-thoughts.blogspot.com/ Steve Bond from the LSE has also posted about the conference http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/clt/?p=225

And, if I read any Greek, I could find out more from this blog http://www.tpe.gr/2007/03/cal07-conference-dublin-ireland.html which links to our group blog.

The lighting is strange in this lecture theatre. We all sit in dim lighting, which is fair enough so that we can see the screen, but it means that the presenter is ill lit. It privileges the screen over the speaker, which seems the wrong way round to me.

Andreia has an activity theory triangle diagream of Open Learn.

Tools: Workshops / meetings guidelines / advice
Subject: Academic
Object: Open content
Division of labour: OpenLearn team / volunteers
Community
Rules
Aagh – can’t blog fast enough.

Andreia compares the ideal situation with the implementation view.

Can’t type up all the implementation view, but here is the rules section:
Rules: integrity model / guidelines / proposal targets / steering group.

The division of labour involves the academic team, the media team and the OU staff and it is not clear who has the final sign-off.

A CAL blog to check out http://speedchange.blogspot.com/
Also, see Gill’s blog in the blog roll.

Jin Tan presented a poster on blogging, so I’ll look out for CAL comments on her blog http://jin-thoughts.blogspot.com/

Paper called “Is there no life in Second Life?’ Presented by Moon Eggplant.

Paul Hollins – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/pah1/- asked to give this paper in world, but the CAL conference organisers wouldn’t let him. Wonder why?

Describing briefly some work in progress.

Refers to Synthetic World (Castranova 1994) and to
Metaverse (Stephenson 1992)

participation observarion as an active resident. Structured interviews, unstructured interviews and a participant and sometime lurker in the SLED group.

Showed us the Second Life Hype Curve – see eg http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/2006/12/second_lifes_ri.html – which is fun.

Shows us video of Ohio University Second Life campus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA Why do we replicate the real-world classroom rather than build something new?

The affordances are very different to those of VLEs.

Informal experiences are better than the formal learning experiences.

About Identity, Space, Activity and Tools. These are the affordances of this environment.

Effective, but challenges existing assessment conventions
Engagin and motivating – Yes, but this is not a given
Empowering – Yes, but this is challenging.

Someone raised the idea of an avatar as an eportfolio. In that case, it is a problem that you cannot move your avatar from one virtual world to another.