I have attended over a dozen sessions, and overall what I’m getting is that educators and technologists are excited by the opportunities and challenges of using the web to enhance learning experiences at all levels.
The opportunities are for collaboration (in small groups and globally), the creation of new knowledge, access to and participation in scholarship, and interactivity. Challenges include the widening of the gap between rich and poor, bad design, uncontrolled and vastly expanding information (much of which has dubious value), marketing interests, and security fears.
Some “take away” notes as I think about the sessions (names linked to conference abstract):
- Providing specific instructions and a rubric grading elements such as relevance, originality, and writing quality improve online discussion participation quantity and quality. (Karen Swan, Kent State Univ)
- Using a blog linked inside Blackboard can replace both Announcements and the lousy discussion forums, but is still instructor-controlled. (Raymond Kimball, US Military Academy at West Point)
- A student project where sound was captured in neighborhoods and then linked to Google maps created high interest but not much analysis among students. (Claudia Engel, Stanford University)
- We know what works for teaching: authentic tasks, problem-based learning, collaborative construction of knowledge, construction of presentation. What doesn’t work is talking heads, isolated learners and low-level outcomes. (Thomas Reeves, University of Georgia)
- New online instructors need help with knowing how to adjust instruction, guide and motivate students online, manage their time, choose appropriate technologies, perceive online student personalities, and model the effective use of technology. (Brian Newberry, CSUSB)
- When assessed on content acquisition, students prefer a standard web page of information to an inquiry-based “conversational agent”. (Bob Heller, Athabasca University)
- A good first day of class activity is a scavenger hunt in groups for information from the course website. (Teresa Adams, Georgia Perimeter College)
- E-Portfolios can be created in different kinds of software and used for keeping track of artifacts over a long period, for assessment and retrieval. (Joan Hanor, CSUSM and Jean Haefner, University of Wisconsin)
- During a collaboration project between American and Danish students, cultural differences caused both learning and challenges. American students tended to base discussion on personal experience, be task-oriented, divide work according to who already knew the topic, and work fewer hours. Danish students based discussion on the assigned materials, focused on process, divided the work according to who needed to learn a topic, and worked more hours. (Ana-Paula Correira, Iowa State University)
- Language students organized themselves into self-help groups to work on a course, having been provided with an audioconferencing tool. (John Pettit, Open University)
- Second Life is not the only virtual world, but it has a huge group of educational participants. (Patricia McGee, University of Texas; Colleen Carmean, Arizona State University; Ulrich Rauch, University of British Columbia; Cyprien Lomas, The University of British Columbia)
- Course Management Systems (now called Learning Management Systems) are cumbersome and problematic, especially when it comes to usability and transportability of content for both instructors and learners. What’s needed is smarter systems, ways to share materials, better integration, and pedagogical scaffolding (including ways to do remediation). Students still can’t create anything inside an LMS. (Patricia McGee, University of Texas, and Colleen Carmean, Arizona State University)
