Other Monday Sessions

Another session "Social software and disrupted learning spaces" presented results from a study of online MA students asked to use blogs as part of their coursework. The presentation contained a relatively good tie of social software to social constructivist thought, however the results of the study were most interesting. The study found that 20% of students became avid bloggers, 30% occasional bloggers, and 50% were "non-existent... reasons for students struggling with blogs: time and assessment pressures, informality (see Goffman's work on impression management), genre (lack of structure), context (i.e. they don't necessarily have the motivational structure that "real bloggers" have).

San Diego State is using Myspace as a place to network with students and provide them with information about the library, its resources, etc. See pics in the flickr stream


Heidi Trotta, Alan Levine and Larry Johnson from the New Media Consortium presented in "Exploring the frontier of virtual worlds" a vision for virtual environments as the next learning space for students. they argue that virtual worlds engage students, encourage active learning and collaboration, make authentic experiences, allow for role playing. Virtual environments, they say, add a sense of presence, give the ability for students to interact outside of the university, encourage higher level cognitive skills, and provide environments for creativity and innovation.

In her presentation "Channeling the backchannel: guidelines for teaching and learning using chatrooms in the classroom" Sarita Yardi outlined results from her research on using IRC "backchannels" as a place for students to have side discussions about what's happening in classes. The chatrooms were found to be useful for students when classes were between 20 & 50 students, and provided a place for students to chat about the course, or other topics that interested them. Two ways of moderating this chat are to show it on a second projector at the front of the room (or second half of screen, etc), or to use a TA to monitor the chat as class happens. The IRC sessions allow students to confirm suspicions, ask/answer questions of one another, etc. Quite interesting was her use of visual displays of data.