Skip to main content

Home/ Learning Environments research group/ Group items tagged Research

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Tarmo Toikkanen

Maintaining and Extending Social Networks in IRC-galleria - 0 views

oa.doria.fi/...7282

research irc-galleria social networks

shared by Tarmo Toikkanen on 04 Sep 09 - No Cached
  • Tarmo Toikkanen on 04 Sep 09
     
    Article abstract: The photo galleries of the internet have raised quite a lot of public discussion, but academic research is just beginning to pay attention to the issue. This research grabs the subject by finding out the meanings given to IRC-galleria concerning its members' social networks. The theoretical framework consists of theories of social networks and communities applied to the context of the internet. Moreover, in analysing the construction of social networks, the research material is analyzed through the concepts of ritual and performance. The research material was generated with 13 semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The interviewees were registered members of IRC-galleria, aged 12-25. Participant observation was conducted by acting as a registered member of IRC-galleria during the course of the research. The interview material was analyzed with theory-bound qualitative content analysis. Meanings given to IRC-galleria were understood as interpretations the interviewees give to their subjective experiences, and therefore also bounded to cultural meaning structures. The rituals of maintaining social networks were approached from a social constructionistic perspective: the interest was on how the social networks are reconstructed in social interaction. The central finding of the research was that already established, "offline" networks play a significant role in being a member of IRC-galleria. IRC-galleria can be interpreted as a way to maintain both local and dispersed networks in a society where group identities are not self-evident. New friendships can be established in IRC-galleria, but personal interests are significant in this, not the possibility to act anonymously, which instead was the claim of previous research. Different interaction rituals are performed for reconstructing the established social networks. IRC-galleria should not therefore be seen solely as a stage for self-promotion, but also as a medium for promoting s
Tarmo Toikkanen

Progressive Inquiry and other learning theories - 0 views

www.helsinki.fi/...background.html

learning pedagogy education progressive inquiry tutkiva oppiminen

shared by Tarmo Toikkanen on 02 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Progressive inquiry relies on an idea of facilitating the same kind of good and productive practices of working with knowledge  -- progressive inquiry  -- that characterize scientific research communities in education. By imitating the practices of scientific research communities, students are encouraged to engage in extended processes of question- and explanation-driven inquiry.  Accordingly, an important aspect of progressive inquiry is to guide students in setting up their own research questions and working theories.  In practice, this means that students are making their conceptions public and working together for improving shared ideas and explanations.  It is also essential to constrain emerging ideas by searching for new information.  Participation in progressive inquiry, in the present case, is usually embedded in computer-supported collaborative learning environments that provide sophisticated tools for supporting the inquiry process as well as sharing of knowledge and expertise.
  • Tarmo Toikkanen on 02 Sep 09
     
    The authoritative description of Progressive Inquiry.
Tarmo Toikkanen

EU Kids Online - EU Kids Online - Research - Department of Media and Communications - Home - 0 views

www2.lse.ac.uk/...Home.aspx

statistics online students pupils

shared by Tarmo Toikkanen on 03 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Tarmo Toikkanen on 03 Dec 12
     
    Statistics on children's and teenagers' use of online services.
Jukka Purma

ISKME - Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education - 0 views

www.iskme.org

plone oer

shared by Jukka Purma on 02 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Jukka Purma on 02 Sep 09
     
    Research projects about oer repositories etc.
Tarmo Toikkanen

Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Social Media and Learning Institutions in the Digital... - 0 views

eduspaces.net/...729305.html

research learning comminity environment social media design

shared by Tarmo Toikkanen on 04 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Shirky (2008) had the presence of mind to notice that real innovation comes when we take the technology for granted.
  • Today, educational institutions still see technology as a new innovation, a disruptive innovation (Bowers & Christensen, 1995). Thus, if my logic is correct, schools, for the most part, are still a few years off from real innovation.
  • In Cultivating Communities of Practice, Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder (2002) derive seven principles. These principles are not recipes, but embody an "understanding of how elements of design work together" (p. 51). They are:Design for evolution.Open dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.Invite different levels of participation.Develop both public and private community spaces.Focus on value.Combine familiarity and excitement.Create a rhythm for the community.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • It is important to note that not one of these elements are about creating predetermined outcomes. Hmmm....Is this what we want in a community for learning? What about our learning objectives? What about our project goals?
  • Whether we're talking about designing communities for learning or designing communities of practice, the design goal centers on adaptability, on an awareness that things that last (or have value) have the ability to evolve as our aims evolve.
  • The value members get from a community is what drives a community. People need to see how their participation will translate into something useful.
  • Drawing from his work with sports teams, jazz combos, and business organizations, Sawyer (2008) identified 10 key conditions that enable dynamic expertise and ultimately group flow (adapted from Csikszentmihalyi, 1990): A shared goal, Close or deep listening to each other, Complete concentration, Being in control of the group's actions and environment, Blending of individual egos, Equal participation, Member's familiarity with each other, Constant communication, Elaboration of each other's ideas, and Frequent failure and learning from frequent failure.
  • Wenger noted that a learning community cannot be completely engineered by expertise. He said a strong, working learning community is a lot like falling in love. It starts as a budding relationship and it builds with time, engagement, commitment, trust, recognition, respect, emotional availability. When these elements are missing, the community falls out of love and the relationship of its members dissolves. However, he suggested a learning community can be built top-down by management to support the worker bees. He also noted that when a learning community is over-engineered, either by participants or management, it can be absolutely meaningless and soul-crushing to its members.
  • According to Wenger (1998), learning within a community of practitioners is about helping each other accomplish tasks, share challenges, passions, and interests. In this sense, managing a learning community is a matter of keeping members motivated, interacting regularly, and creating conditions that allow members to learn from and with one another to improve their ability to do what they do.
  • It's more than about the technology, tools, tactics; it's about a combination of strategies, tools, and the habits of mind associated with shared innovation.
  • It can be done well and not so well; hence the need for shared goals, clear rules of participation, a solid strategy, and the right tools for the right purpose.
  • Given the economical, technological, sociological, historical changes taking place all around us, educational institutions have been slow to adapt. These changes have led to ubiquitous access to information and ubiquitous communication. Combined, these two trends lead to new understandings of how people learn and work that, in turn, leads to new ways of thinking about community. Research suggests that real innovation comes when we take the technology for granted. Yet, many of today's educational institutions still see technology as a new innovation, a disruptive innovation (Bowers & Christensen, 1995), thus learning institutions by and large are still a few years off from real innovation. When we examine the idea of communities for learning, instead of focusing on tactics to bring about meaningful growth and change, we need to better define our strategies--we need to know where we want to go, talk openly about them, reflect on them, refine them, and test them out. Creating meaningful communities for practice is an iterative process. Designers can help foster change by designing communities for learning that recognize the key conditions that allow for creativity and innovation to happen. Designers can also help communities for learning by helping community leaders develop rules for engagement that allow for strong, meaningful exchange and reflection.
Jukka Purma

OER Research - 0 views

oer.issuelab.org/research

oer papers

shared by Jukka Purma on 02 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Jukka Purma on 02 Sep 09
     
    65 OER-related articles, some poor quality or old
Tarmo Toikkanen

le group - 0 views

legroup.uiah.fi

legroup blog

shared by Tarmo Toikkanen on 02 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Tarmo Toikkanen on 02 Sep 09
     
    Learning Environments research group home page and blog
Tarmo Toikkanen

Facebook 'enhances intelligence' but Twitter 'diminishes it', claims psychologist - Tel... - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...es-it-claims-psychologist.html

learning twitter facebook research memory sometu

shared by Tarmo Toikkanen on 08 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Sudoku also stretched the working memory, as did keeping up with friends on Facebook, she said. But the ''instant'' nature of texting, Twitter and YouTube was not healthy for working memory.
  • Tarmo Toikkanen on 08 Sep 09
     
    Spending time on the Facebook networking site could enhance a key element of intelligence that is vital to success in life, a psychologist has claimed, but using Twitter may have the opposite effect.
Tarmo Toikkanen

DSpace at Open Universiteit Nederland: Evidence of cross-boundary use and reuse of digi... - 0 views

dspace.ou.nl/1709

research learning objects metadata reuse

shared by Tarmo Toikkanen on 04 Sep 09 - Cached
  • In this study we conducted an investigation on the server-end log-files of teachers’ Collections of educational resources in a number of content platforms. Our goal was to find empirical evidence from the field that teachers use and reuse learning resources that are in a language other than their mother tongue and originate from different countries than they do. We call these cross-boundary learning resources. We compared the cross-boundary reuse of educational resources to the general reuse figure of 20%, and find that it was either equal to or less than the general reuse. We further studied the coverage, the overlap and the pick-up rate of these resources, and propose steps that could improve the probability of discovery, use and reuse of cross-boundary resources.
  • Tarmo Toikkanen on 04 Sep 09
     
    Riina Vuorikari's article. In this study we conducted an investigation on the server-end log-files of teachers' Collections of educational resources in a number of content platforms. Our goal was to find empirical evidence from the field that teachers use and reuse learning resources that are in a language other than their mother tongue and originate from different countries than they do. We call these cross-boundary learning resources. We compared the cross-boundary reuse of educational resources to the general reuse figure of 20%, and find that it was either equal to or less than the general reuse. We further studied the coverage, the overlap and the pick-up rate of these resources, and propose steps that could improve the probability of discovery, use and reuse of cross-boundary resources.
Tarmo Toikkanen

What is the Future of Teaching? - 0 views

mashable.com/...online-education-teachers

education teaching e-learning future trends sometu futurelearning online learning onlinelearning

shared by Tarmo Toikkanen on 10 Sep 09 - Cached
  • According to the New York Times Bits blog, a recent study funded by the US Department of Education (PDF) found that on the whole, online learning environments actually led to higher tested performance than face-to-face learning environments.
  • “In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages,” writes the authors of the report (emphasis theirs). “At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction.”
  • We can conclude that those in online learning environments tested better, but not necessarily why.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Researchers warned that “various online learning implementation practices may have differing effectiveness for K–12 learners than they do for older students,” which seems plausible.
  • The word education, after all, comes from the Latin educare, which means, “to lead out.” I.e., think Socrates. Anyone can absorb information from a book or video, but good teachers will always be necessary to draw out that knowledge and help students develop the skills needed to think critically about the information they consume. In other words, online learning tools are just like any other tools in a teacher’s bag of tricks: what matters is how they’re applied. The instruction of good teachers will be made better by the proper application of web tools, while bad teachers won’t necessarily be made better by utilizing online education methods.
  • It comes down to knowing how to best use the tools at your disposal to maximize the impact of education for students, which has always been what separates good teachers from bad ones. The major difference between teachers of today and teachers of the future is that in the future educators will have better online tools and will require better specialized training to learn how to utilize them properly.
    • Tarmo Toikkanen
      Tarmo Toikkanen on 10 Sep 09
       
      Exactly. The tools are not the point, it's the learning results that matter. And they stem from the learning activities, which in turn are supported by the tools that are employed.
  • Teachers will certainly need to adapt in order to use new tools and methods, but that’s nothing new. Online education may never completely replace face-to-face learning, though as the Department of Education study shows, with enough time and under the guidance of a good teacher, online learning environments can produce results that are just as good or better than classroom learning. Online learning is likely to be used more often to enhance face-to-face learning in the future, however, and in communities where classroom learning is infeasible due to lack of funds, online learning is an adequate stand-in.
  • Tarmo Toikkanen on 10 Sep 09
     
    Good analysis on the impact of new tools, and the need for great teachers.
Tarmo Toikkanen

Future Learning Environment - selvitys - 0 views

www.mlab.uiah.fi/...samun_selvitys.html

learning environment future fle 1997

shared by Tarmo Toikkanen on 25 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Tarmo Toikkanen on 25 Nov 09
     
    Samu Mielosen selvitys vuodelta 1997
1 - 13 of 13
Showing 20▼ items per page