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By Raj, August 19, 2009 12:59 pm

While bumping across feeds and tweets this morning, I came across this article – Get out of MySpace! (Norah Jones, Haydn Blackey, Karen Fitzgibbon and Esyin Chew – doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.07.008). In the past I’ve commented that students don’t really like having the “tower” come into their online social space. ECAR had article on this and I had attended a session at ISSOTL as well. This however is the first research on the topic that I’ve seen (I’m sure there will be more). What they found was:

In the context of higher education, there is a general campaign and trend for life-long learning, inquiry-based learning, peer-assisted learning and learning in groups for social constructivists. On the other hand, there is an interesting argument appeared from the students’ voices in this research – they refuse to use social software for learning due to their separation of ‘life’ and studying’ or ‘home’ and ‘lectures’. Learning is a ‘painful’ process where as social life is pleasure to many students. One of them has a strong and disconfirming assertion:

Interviewer: “Do you think that social software can provide a more holistic learning for you if they were embedded in the learning module?”

Student C1: “No! Get out from my space! …social software is for fun you know, not for study!”

In addition to social spaces being a “fun” space, students also suggest that instructors are often not knowledgeable enough to integrate social technology:

Some students may not keen in additional “e-tivities” since there are so many physical activities to be involved. Only by individual interest or with extra time availability, students would go further to participate in online activities. In contrast to the massive take-up of certain social software such as Facebook among student cohort, the issue of time-consuming could be related to the attitude of separating social life and learning. Students may perceive Facebook or blog as personal and social pleasure and has nothing to do with the curriculum learning.

Lecturers are not up-to-date and may not know how to integrate and make use of social software

Social software is not the cause of an issue but the lecturer is. Students further expressed their wish list from a pedagogical perspective. For example, students hope their lecturers could teach innovatively, teach with educational passion and keep themselves up-to-date:

“I hope the lecturer can teach other than the conventional way, more things other than the subject area itself. I think many lecturers are not up-to-date!” Student A2

“The problem now is not because of the technology…the problem is the lecturers themselves. The lecturers do not know how to integrate all these. Perhaps the lecturers know how to use them but it is useless if they don’t have passion in education.” Student A1

The article has a number of suggestions in the conclusion, but the kicker for me is the idea of the “social-learning divide”. This “gap” is one that the academy must mind if it hopes to walk the line between becoming part of a student’s life and interfering with it. If the academy looks to the social space as a place where attitudes can be encouraged, then I think it will go much further than if it tries to use the social space for a curricular outcome. For example, a Chemistry prof might put up interesting articles that are not related to the class perse in their social stream for students to pick up. If a small number become interested enough to follow up on those articles, then the coursework that the prof is delivering might have a better chance of sticking as the student now has a “fun” connection to the “hard” material.

At the end of the day, institutions should really look at their social presences as ways to build lifelong learners at best and to advertise their “standard line” at worst. If they try to use it as yet another C/LMS, it seems that they are bound to fail.

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By Raj, October 21, 2008 12:33 pm

Looking at the latest ECAR survey, I found some interesting findings. The first is that putting materials online does not encourage students to skip, IT does make student life more convenient and TheirSpace does exist.

Skipping Classes When Materials are Online
Also, for the first time in 2008, the ECAR survey asked students if they skip classes when materials  from course lectures are available online. Just more than 62% of students disagree or strongly disagree. About 1 in 6 respondents, however, agree that they skip classes when these materials are online. When asked about skipping classes in the focus groups, students mention the importance of interaction with the instructor in learning the course materials.

Student Success and IT in Courses
How does higher education’s use of IT affect student success? While this is a bottom-line concern for both educators and administrators, it is fraught with exceedingly complicated issues. Still, the ECAR survey provides a valuable opportunity to learn more about this critical area—specifically about how students perceive the impact of IT on courses. To this end, ECAR designed one question about each of three important dimensions of student success:

• Learning: “The use of IT in my courses improves my learning.” (45.7% of respondents agree)
• Student engagement: “I get more actively involved in courses that use IT.” (31.8% agree)
• Convenience: “IT makes doing my course activities more convenient.” (65.6% agree)

Convenience is the clear front-runner. Each year, in both the quantitative and qualitative data, respondents have told us that convenience is the most valuable benefit of IT in courses. Still, 9.4% of 2008 respondents disagree, indicating that there is room for improvement even on the convenience dimension. With respect to learning, almost half agree (45.7%), another 39.3% are neutral, and 15.1% disagree that IT in courses improves their learning.

SNS
Only 5.5%, however, extend their use of SNSs to communication with instructors about course-related matters. Students in focus groups and in the survey comments expressed both pros and cons to involvement of instructors in their SNS lives—many adamant that SNSs should be the exclusive realm of students, but others liking the idea of interacting with instructors and teaching assistants using the same SNS mechanism
they already use to communicate with friends and classmates.

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By Raj, October 20, 2008 2:51 pm

Am I ever glad I copied this before I posted:

Emerging from ISSOTL, I had some time on the train, so I took advantage of one of the apps that I just downloaded – Viigo – to read some of my feeds while I was waiting/riding. A few articles caught my attention and so this morning while I was going through Reader (hmm… it seems that all my brain dumps start this way) when I saw them again, I was sure to take action – a little bit of scaffolding in action there – seeing headlines twice seems to be useful in being able to identify the signal from the noise as opposed to a careful once through reading.

Anyway, so the first article was the new PEW survey on networked families, the second was an article that looked at how mobile phone users use their phones, the third was from EduTopia about collaboration and the last was from Science Daily on the idea of “TheirSpace” that came out earlier this year article that looked at a study on social networks. So how are all of these linked in my mind?

The PEW article suggests that even though the ubiquitous connectivity that is affored by broadband and ubergadgets would keep family members (I’m assuming that these are in middle/upper middle SES homes) locked into their own worlds, be that pleasure or work, families are still able to be “together while apart in the same room”.

Despite fears that many Americans are isolated from family members, because of  separate agendas and immersive personal internet and cell phones, most families are together at night.  Their heavy home internet use suggests that many households are hubs of personal communication networks, as people log on individually to email, IM, post on social networking sites and chat. They are both together with their families and connecting outward to friends and relatives elsewhere. They are neither isolated individuals nor Dick and Jane’s traditional family. Rather, their households are active sites of the interplay of individual activity and family togetherness.

The second article looks at activities users partake in when on the phone (in the US) and the top three uses are messaging, mobile internet and email. This seems to suggest that it is indeed possible for families to remain “together while apart” as PEW suggests. So if we extend the idea of the family into the classroom, it would go to suggest that people or students/instructors are willing and able to use network connected devices to maintain their connections outside of the home and perhaps the classroom – assuming that the individual enjoys either or both.

Edutopia looks at collaboration and how collaboration/social learning comtinues to show results:

• Students learn more deeply when they can apply classroom-gathered knowledge to real-world problems, and when they take part in projects that require sustained engagement and collaboration.
• Active-learning practices have a more significant impact on student performance than any other variable, including student background and prior achievement.
• Students are most successful when they are taught how to learn as well as what to learn.

In my head, this connects not only to the first two articles about connectivity, but also to the ideas that I took away from ISSOTL that students need to be encouraged to look inside themselves to find truth and knowledge. By extending the classroom beyond its usual walls, students are able to interact with content, or observe concepts in the “world” while away from the expert, encouraging them to ask their own questions and form their own knowledge. If we are able to take first article that people do indeed use networked devices to connect and collaborate when together in groups of similar disposition (families, classrooms, clubs etc).

But before someone inside the academy spots the thread of social networks through the first few resources, Science Daily brings forward this warning:

But the survey also found that 41 per cent of students were against being contacted directly by tutors via Facebook. A report on the preliminary findings warns that the university will need to tread carefully if it wants to use Facebook to communicate with students for administrative or teaching and learning purposes.

The researchers say: “The survey data illustrate that Facebook is part of the ‘social glue’ that helps students settle into university life, that keeps the student body together as a community and which aids in communication (especially about social events) between the student body. However, care must be taken not to over privilege Facebook: it is clearly only one aspect of student’s social networking practices and clearly face-to-face relationships and interactions remain significant.

So how does this all stitch together as an extention of ISSOTL? Well, it seems to suggest that as different as we seem to think the millenials are, for some things, they really are not all that different. Face to face time is important, collaboration is important, being involved in their learning is important.  This is all great for creating some manner of rationalization as why not to “go heavy” into technology integration, but if the family and clubs (interest and otherwise) are any indication, technology is being used already in a near seemless way to extend and enhance face time, collaboration and involvement – so why is that not happening in the classroom? Is it that, as some claim, instructors just don’t want to use technology? That the academy wants to remain “basic and accessible/pure”? Or is it just an inability to assess being able to get the job done in more than one way? What is it that is holding the classroom back?