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| Milton Chen urged participants to build the future. Paul Kim described the positive experiences of 20,000 students in an open online course. One panel made a strong case for building skills for digital citizenship. |
The SITE conference was held in New Orleans this year. Milton Chen praised project learning and presented the George Lucas Educational Foundation’s Edutopia site. According to Chen, instructors can evaluate the appeal of their teaching by observing whether students come into the class as fast as they go out. Paul Kim talked about Stanford’sSMILE learning environment, which is built around learners’ questions. Based on his experience with an open, online course with 20 000 participants, Kim gave a new meaning for the acronym MOOC – “massive open online course” becomes “massive ongoing online course”, as students continue to work in self-chosen ways after the official end of the course. He also urged participants to forget the debate over internet-based courses versus classroom instruction, because learning is present everywhere: on-line and off-line should be combined into all-line learning.
Mariana Patru from UNESCO was concerned about the geographical and gender-based digital divide, which mobile learning may be able to narrow. Worldwide, more than 775 million people are illiterate, two thirds of them women. In developing countries, most people connect to the internet via mobile devices, which can provide access to global educational resources for marginalized people. Even though men account for more use of mobile devices, these tools offer many women their only chance for education.
Interaction Requires Freedom and Inspiration
Several presentations dealt with online discussion. Jon Dron from Athabasca University presented an interesting thesis: “The more structure you have, the less dialog.” In an online learning environment, participants should have an opportunity to self-organize and to create their own spaces for different purposes. Karen McFerrin from the University of Louisiana sounded like me when she spoke about content analysis: you should systematically monitor online discussions during a course. Pay attention to critical thinking, focusing, reflection, and writing style. Susan Patterson, in turn, presented the SNAPP software, which creates graphs based on online course interaction; it shows who is talking with whom and who remains isolated. The instructor can therefore address a situation just in time. Mahnaz Moallem has studied the impact of synchronous and asynchronous discussion on motivation, self-direction and learning outcomes. These two ways of interacting are not significantly different, but the best results come from combining them.
Skills for Digital Citizens
I got the largest number of ideas from a panel that included Michael Searson, Bonnie Sutton, David Whittier, Robert Plants, David Gibson, Joke Voogt, Marilyn Ochoa, and Vic Sutton. They proposed that skills for digital citizenship should be a part of the curriculum, but teachers often lack these themselves. Among the skills the panel recommended: knowledge of open materials, media literacy, cyber ethics and online communication skills. Joke Voogt defined levels of competence: a passive user understands what’s going on, an active one uses web resources, a competent user is able to interact online, a skillful user also knows how to influence others. A good digital citizen participates and actively contributes to matters affecting his life and environment. Technology will likely bring a revolution to civic participation like the one taking place in education.
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| SITE offers the chance to discuss the state of online education around the world. Joyce Pittman says that change requires know-how, resources, and commitment. According to Blance O’Bannon‘s research, the educational use of Facebook improved learning – although one participant suspects that teachers just wanted to be hip and cool… like jazz , the pulse of New Orleans. |