Course Reflection

Learning Experience
I learned about some new communication tools (TaPingYa, TokBox, and the video functions of Google Chat), though I'd already used many of them (Google's text chat, Wimba, Ning, Wikispaces, WebCT). It was interesting to become familiar with the programs, and think about how they'd be used in a K12 or collegiate/adult education environment (the uses we came up with were very different depending upon which of the two settings we were talking about).

The term paper was a tremendous learning experience for me. My topic was discussion forums in online education. Since the paper was essentially a literature review, rather than a major research project (like we did in IT742 and REF601), it ended up touching on many aspects of discussion forum use, including assessment, the types of questions asked, peer and instructor facilitation, depth of conversation, social constructivism, and the relative lack of research to show the ways in which discussion and learning are connected. Because of writing that paper, I'll be better able to write discussion forum questions should I end up teaching an online class.

Strong and Weak Points
My strong points are my ability to communicate and my ability to quickly learn and adapt to new software, hardware, concepts etc. This helped me a lot not only in the discussions and term paper, but in the group projects (and basically all aspects of this course). My biggest weakness this summer was my frustration with computer failures, the fact that my laptop died and my desktop PC is very old, my hatred for Blackboard/WebCT's interface and slow reaction time, and the fact that I was in a constant state of distraction. This summer I was taking 9 hours, working as a research assistant, hunting for full time jobs, taking seminars to prepare for a job that failed to get funded (at the last minute), and preparing for my comps. Nothing actually got my full attention or concentration, and I fell behind somewhat in my Blog because I basically forgot about it with everything else going on. But I think I was able to overcome and do at least an acceptable job at everything.

Interaction
I didn't feel like there was a tremendous amount of interaction between the students within the WebCT shell, except for those students in our groups. And even then, there was relatively little communication after the last group project was finished. Some of this may be simply because most of us were pressed for time. Some of it may have been because the discussion questions were more formal, based on making sure we read and understood the lessons for the week.
However, the Blogs were much less formal, and we had more leeway to put our personal touches on them. So I felt like within the Blogs, there was a lot more interaction. While reading and commenting on the Blogs, I felt like I had more of a connection to the other students. I absolutely think the Blogs were a good addition to the class.
Dr. Wang has always been quick to respond to students' questions or problems, and so I felt like the instructor-student interaction was good.

Communication Tools
I liked Google (text) Chat because it is a true Web 2.0 technology, and can be used within Gmail with no additional software or downloads required. It made it very convenient and easy to keep in touch during the group projects. The only down side was that if I had Gmail open, I was constantly getting messages, so that if I wanted to get anything accomplished, I had to close Gmail.
I also liked Wimba. When used within WebCT, it required no additional software, and it worked well regardless of whether we had webcams or not. In fact, it would have worked fine without a microphone, because you can type text messages as well as talk out loud. While it's a high-bandwidth only solution, I think once high-speed Internet becomes more widespread, Wimba will see a great deal of use.
Ning was wonderful. An instructor could almost run an online course with just a password protected Ning account. It has synchronous chat, places to post images and files, discussion boards, and messages. Now I understand why Dr. Yuen used it for one of our classes last Fall.
The others were somewhat less impressive to me. Tokbox's main strength was that it was Web 2.0 and didn't require software installation. It did have the option of posting video messages, which was nice if you're in a mostly text-environment (no webcams or low bandwidth). TaPingYa seemed kind of pointless to me: after trying it out and using it, I still can't think of anything useful to do with it. I was already very familiar with Wikispaces, but I think it has fairly limited uses educationally. It's good for group projects, I suppose, but Google Documents is probably better, because it allows the files to be saved, modified, and downloaded, rather than just fit into an Wiki format.

Group Work
The groups were necessary because we were testing out synchronous communication tools, and that's obviously something that one person can't do by him or her self. I had a good group, overall. Though we had some scheduling difficulties, I feel that everyone pitched in and did his or her part to make our group projects a success. I don't think anybody “slouched” or lazily let others do all the work. So overall, the group work was a success, in my opinion.

Suggestions
Overall, the class went pretty well. I can't really think of many things I'd change, except that I tend to prefer discussion forum questions that are less direct, with more room for different answers and disagreement, so as to encourage more debate. I think this creates an environment in which the students are learning a great deal from each other, and are exchanging their experiences, perspectives, and thoughts on the matter.

Ooops! Project Three

I see that I should have made this its own post, instead of posting one post talking about Projects Two and Three.

To remedy that (better late than never), I'm reposting my Project Three discussion here, along with the link to the report.

We tried out four different online tools: two synchronous and two asynchronous. We tried out Wikispaces, which I was already familiar with (and which I suggested). I find Wikispaces to be of great use, because you can all edit it, but it records what changes have been done and who made them, allowing you to not only update information, but grade group work by checking exactly who has done what, and when they did it. Tapingya was interesting, but I struggled to find much use for it (that's the story of the Internet, sometimes). Tokbox was cool, especially the way you could "post" short video messages while communicating via text, voice, or video.

I loved Ning. It's like being able to set up a class website or social network site, with built-in chat function, all by yourself. It's a great resource for the online component of a class that isn't going to be using WebCT/Blackboard.

Artifact: Broken into three parts, because Google Documents has a 500K limit.

Group Three Project Three Part One
Group Three Project Three Part Two
Group Three Project Three Part Three

Research Paper Thoughts

Well, I've finished the first draft of my research paper. It's in proper APA format, so I could submit it today if I wanted to, but since it's not due until Monday, I'm probably going to sleep on it for a day or two, then go back and revise it. I always end up with better papers if I do that.

I have to admit, I was a little worried about this. You see, I'd gathered and read most of my sources, but I'd forgotten to get Dr. Wang's approval for my topic. Thankfully, she okayed my topic, and I didn't have to start over.

Speaking of my topic, I chose something that has been a tremendous part of my life for the last nine months: discussion forums in online classes.

Online classes are, of course, growing in prevalence, and they're mostly asynchronous. There are a couple of reasons for that, I believe - asynchronous classes are more convenient for working adults (nontraditional students), who tend to make up the bulk of online students, and many people lack the hardware and bandwidth to take full advantage of synchronous tools like videoconferencing or Second Life.

Discussion forums are the heart of asynchronous education (in fact, that's the working title for my paper: "The Heart of Asynchronous Education: Designing, Facilitating, and Assessing Student Participation in Online Course Discussion Forums"), and I wanted to explore what educational researchers had written about making good use of online course discussion.

I found that there is not yet a real consensus on best practices in online discussion forums, and that there are ongoing debates as to how to define participation, the role of lurking, and what should be done to facilitate and assess online discussion.

As far as my writing habits, this hasn't been a one-day thing. I've spent a lot of time reading, making notes, writing, editing, and digging up more sources over the course of the last week and a half or so, even though I had the majority of my sources before then (and had read and taken notes on several of them).

APA format is interesting. After I wrote the paper, I went back through it with the APA manual in my lap, fixing all of the citation mistakes. When it comes to formatting, never listen to people: just get the manual. APA (or MLA, or Chicago Manual) formatting is like computing the value of pi: you'll never quite get to the end of it, and opinions are pretty much irrelevant.

I have to say I learned quite a lot about discussion forums from the articles I read, especially since there was so much disagreement and different perspectives among the different authors. I found the social constructivist approach (as taken by A. P. Rovai and others) to be interesting, but I found that it completely ignored the internal and solitary processes of learning, as if learning were a process that ONLY took place in social contexts. I repeatedly found myself drawn to the arguments of Vanessa Paz Dennen, who offered no simple answers, but certainly asked the right questions.

Artifact: Term Paper

A few thoughts on the web site.

Using Cooltext to create the buttons was an easy way to make the site look about a hundred times more professional than sites I'd done in previous years where I just used hyperlinked text.

Because of time constraints, I didn't try to go into really fancy stuff, like hyperlinked images, nested tables, or CSS.

One thing about NVU is that it's hard to do CSS in it. It's easier in Dreamweaver, where you can have a split screen between source and page layout. But another problem with WYSIWYG web editors is that they often won't show the formatting effects of a CSS sheet until you test-view the page in a browser. Here's hoping the next generation can make that work (I've never used CS4 Dreamweaver - maybe it's better).

But anyway, for a page like this, CSS wasn't really necessary.

I just tried to keep everything clean looking, organized, readable, and easy to navigate through.

I'll really appreciate any comments or suggestions anyone might have. I'm sure there are things that can be improved.

Web site ... complete!

Well, I got my web site up with no real problems, other than having to download WinSCP because Filezilla utterly failed me.

Looking at the site, there are definitely some things I'm hoping to improve, particularly the text layout in a couple of places. Overall I think it's pretty readable, and pretty easy to navigate. I'd appreciate any suggestions y'all might have.

Later!

Artifact: Web Site: "http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~w469047/index.html"

Preliminary Thoughts on Web Site

I'm finding this assignment to be pretty easy so far, because I've used NVU, and I'm not really a stranger to Web Design (I'm not an expert, either, but the process ceased being scary a long time ago) :)

I just hope I am doing an adequate job with the class-related parts of it. I'll try to put it up on ocean tomorrow so y'all can see it. Hopefully you'll have some advice so that I can improve it.

A wild ride

It has been quite a crazy semester, between taking 9 hours, working as a research assistant, searching for a job for the fall, applying for the PhD program and taking comps. I just noticed I've neglected the blogging part of IT648.

Well, here goes:

I've been learning a lot this summer. Particularly, I've found the online communication tools to be very interesting.

I worked with a really good group (Rongfei, Eloise, Charity, Roslyn, and myself) when we were exploring these tools. A couple of weeks ago, we tried out the Wimba Liveclassroom that's available through Blackboard. One thing I liked about it was that you could easily participate even if you lacked a video camera, and you could still see and hear what others said or did, even if you were limited to communicating through texts. I found that to be very convenient, especially when you have different students with different connection speeds and different types of hardware available.

The next week, we tried out four different online tools: two synchronous and two asynchronous. We tried out Wikispaces, which I was already familiar with (and which I suggested). I find Wikispaces to be of great use, because you can all edit it, but it records what changes have been done and who made them, allowing you to not only update information, but grade group work by checking exactly who has done what, and when they did it. Tapingya was interesting, but I struggled to find much use for it (that's the story of the Internet, sometimes). Tokbox was cool, especially the way you could "post" short video messages while communicating via text, voice, or video.

I loved Ning. It's like being able to set up a class website or social network site, with built-in chat function, all by yourself. It's a great resource for the online component of a class that isn't going to be using WebCT/Blackboard.

Oops. I see that I should have made this two posts. I'll add a second post later on, with the Project 3 information and links.

Artifact: Group Three Project Two