Group items tagged

Moving from constructivist philosophy, psychology and epistemology to the characterization of constructivist learning environments presents the challenge of synthesizing a large spectrum of somewhat disparate concepts. An appropriate analogy for the way in which constructivist concepts have evolved is that of a prism with many facets. While the facets reflect the same light and form one part of a whole, they nonetheless each present distinct and finely delineated boundaries.

This is the second in a series of three papers about online pedagogy and educational practice as part of the JISE "Online Education Forma." This paper deals with the question: How is teaching online different from conventional teaching? By comparing these differences along several dimensions, a set of recommended practices for online teaching emerges. This article examines issues such as online course organization and planning, teaching guidelines and constraints, relationships between students and teacher, lectures versus tutorials, and assessment of student performance. A transition is underway. The same networking and computing technology that has revolutionised global commerce, and many other facets of modem life, is now being targeted at education. Partnering the Internet with modern course management systems makes it possible for universities to offer online courscwork on a global basis. The critical task that lies ahead is to create and disseminate curricula of high quality online that students can embrace and educators can sustain. The overall objective of JISE's Online Education Forum is to examine the realities of college and university online teaching, and the processes of education using today's information technologies. The issues and insights discussed in this forum will provide educators with important tools and the understanding needed to embrace the world of online education. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Describes anchored discussion. Compares regular discussion with anchored discussion.

Anchored discussion is a form of collaborative literature processing. It "starts from the notion of collaborative discussion that is contextualized or anchored within a specific content" (van der Pol, Admiraal & Simons, 2006). In this course, the discussions we participate in are based on prompts that address ideas included in each of the required resources for each module. However, an anchored discussion is a discussion that is focused on one piece of literature. As students read and digest the material, discussions about the meaning of that material occur within a window where the material is present. It is like having an asynchronous chat window open next to a research article. (van der Pol et al., 2006) As I started learning about anchored discussions, I saw many connections to shared annotation such as what we use Diigo for. Van der Pol et al. (2006) state that "shared annotation might leave more room for individual processes, but is shown to have some limitations in supporting interactivity". Anchored discussions take shared annotation a step further in that it requires conversation (as opposed to individual notes) regarding a resource. The collaborative piece of anchored discussions really got my attention in that it provides greater opportunity for the development of teaching presence by both students and the instructor. The opportunity to facilitate a discussion within the context of a required reading is an exciting idea for me. The use of anchored discussion allows for all three facets of teaching presence: instructional design and organization, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction (Shea, Pickett, & Pelz, 2003). I am wondering if there is a way to use Diigo in creating anchored discussions.

A remnant of a faculty development workshop - many links don't work but this page is a nice summary of the ideas

In the present study we review ongoing issues of pedagogy and faculty development, and their relationship to student satisfaction, and reported learning in SLN. We provide an overview of the SLN program, and summarize a conceptual framework for our current research on higher education, online learning environments. This framework integrates research on how people learn [2], with principles of good practice in higher education [3] and recent research on learning in asynchronous learning networks (ALNs) in higher education [4]. We also present results of a follow-up study on one aspect of the model, "Teaching Presence".

Teaching presence vs. social presence

Anchored discussion can provide opportunities to develop all three facets of teacher presence in one activity.

Learn to embrace and be a part of their world and they will become more of an active learner.

I found this article as I was researching as to what I wanted to do for my course. I was really debating whether I wanted to do a course for adults or if I wanted to do one at the middle school level. This article was definitely one of my deciding factors.