a legal critique of research methods

In Video Software v. Schwarzenegger, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit tears several studies to shreds:

Research 2.0

Do you need to analyze statistics?  Want to analyze data for free?  Thinking about how to visualize data? How about generating “word clouds” from text you provide? (I’m looking at you, qualitative researchers…)

Digital Research Tools (DiRT) is a wiki that “collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively,” including online tools for organizing research, data collection, transcription, note-taking, blogging and a lot more.

a new meaning for literacy

via Slashdot, the San Francisco Chronicle reports on November 20, 2008:

Rather than wasting their time, children who gab on Facebook or play online games are gaining valuable social skills and learning some technology basics, according to a study to be released today.

The report, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, contradicts the idea held by many educators, parents and policymakers that children should be blocked from online social networks and video games like Halo, which allow users in different locations to play together. Instead, children should be encouraged to use the technologies to gain a certain level of digital literacy, the study said.

… But critics have called social networking a distraction and, in some cases, a danger because of the potential for children to befriend strangers. Hoping to limit children’s use of the services, some schools now block access to such sites.

and why not build online social networks for schools?

Self-directed learning and brain development

via Kottke, from the New Yorker on November 17, 2008, a critique of the “brain plasticity” research published in the nineteen-nineties,” with emphasis added to highlight the relationship between self-directed learning and brain development:

This research said that, while the infant brain is, in part, the product of genes, that endowment is just the clay; after birth, it is “sculpted” by the child’s experience, the amount of stimulation he receives, above all in the first three years of life. That finding prompted many programs aimed at stimulating babies whose mothers, for whatever reason (often poverty), seemed likely to neglect them. Social workers drove off to homes deemed at risk, to play with the new baby.

But upper-middle-class parents—and marketers interested in them—also read about the brain-plasticity findings, and figured that, if some stimulation is good, more is better. (Hence Baby Einstein.) Later research has provided no support for this. The conclusion, in general, is that the average baby’s environment provides all the stimuli he or she needs.

Marano thinks that the infant-stimulation craze was a scandal. She accepts the idea of brain plasticity, but she believes that the sculpting goes on for many years past infancy and that its primary arena should be self-stimulation, as the child ventures out into the world. While Mother was driving the kid nuts with the eight-hundredth iteration of “This Little Piggy,” she should have been letting him play on his own.

Marano assembles her own arsenal of neurological research, guaranteed to scare the pants off any hovering parent. As children explore their environment by themselves—making decisions, taking chances, coping with any attendant anxiety or frustration—their neurological equipment becomes increasingly sophisticated, Marano says. “Dendrites sprout. Synapses form.” If, on the other hand, children are protected from such trial-and-error learning, their nervous systems “literally shrink.”

Open Access online research links

This is a collection of free, almost-free and sometimes-free websites that publish peer-reviewed articles and studies that relate to education, learning, web technology and the online world.

Many of these links were found in posts from Online Learning Update, which also exists here.  Some links were found via the Directory of Open Access Journals.  This list will be updated when additional resources are found, and readers are encouraged to add suggestions in the comments.

Free:

Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education ( CITE )

“Established with funding from a U.S. Department of Education … grant, CITE Journal makes possible the inclusion of sound, animated images, and simulation, as well as allowing for ongoing, immediate dialog about theoretical issues.”

The European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning ( EURODL )

“an online journal on distance and e-learning, publishes the accounts of research, development and teaching” “free to readers and contributes to the Open Content movement.”

a view of the blogosphere

via Data Mining: Mapping The Blogosphere:

Here we have a hyperbolic display of blogs using both the WWE and the ICWSM 2007 data sets.

03/1/2007

“A Vision of Students Today”

is the title to this video by Dr. Michael Wesch and the students of Introduction to Cultural Anthropology,  Class of Spring 2007 at Kansas State University:

which presents a question about how to effectively employ web technology in the classroom.

Obamagogy

image via Consumerist, from MoveOn

“What we’ve been doing is trying to teach people to do what Obama does during his speeches — to tell their own stories to motivate others,” he says. “You’re building this sense of commitment to both the values and people, but you’re structuring it purposefully to achieve goals like, ‘In this district, we need 2,000 votes.’”

Via Wired on October 29, 2008:

Obama is the first to successfully integrate technology with a revamped model of political organization that stresses volunteer participation and feedback on a massive scale.

The Internet can make you “smarter” if you learn how to use it

update: The BBC reports on October 14, 2008:

Areas activated by reading a book in the brain of an experienced web user:

Web use stimulates much more activity in the same brain:

Brain activity in web newcomers: similar for reading and internet use:

“Adult learning theory” in the Kindergarten classroom

From the New York Times on October 8, 2008:

The IBPYP model is based on inquiry, participation in the process of learning, and exploration. It is learner-driven, not-teacher dominated. Teachers act as facilitators in the learning process and children’s questions and interests are at the center of the classroom.

… In the current national climate of testing, we have to make time for creative expression. It is urgent. Children need some constructive form of release.

… Children express their creativity and intelligence in a variety of ways. By allowing students to safely explore beyond their typical boundaries, we are encouraging them to express themselves in unique ways in a positive, safe, non-judgmental environment. Performance and open-ended inquiry help us move beyond traditional models of education. The arts, performance, and inquiry are small steps we take to help our students regain ownership of their learning.

I have not been comfortable making a significant distinction between adults and children when looking at the needs of learners for the purpose of developing an idea of what an online component of a classroom could look like.

I have tended to think of learners in a spectrum, and have found that the factor of a learner’s chronological age has not been particularly useful as a way to make distinctions between learners.  From a developmental standpoint, I know that it is a factor due to the physiological processes that happen as we age.  However, it has seemed clear that some children demonstrate adult learning needs, and some adults have learning needs that resemble the needs associated with children.

In this article, we have principles that I have come to associate with adult education now being applied to children in kindergarten.  Children are being encouraged to be self-directed learners.  The idea that children cannot “own” their education is being challenged.

In our classrooms, inquiry comes alive through performance. This week in our kindergarten we are starting a unit called “We are Peacemakers.” In this unit, the children learn about sharing, cooperation, conflict resolution, expressing feelings, and building community. We start the unit by asking the children what they know about peace and being a peacemaker. We then use their questions and interests to guide the inquiry process.

dynamic collaboration and thoughtful citizenship

From the New York Times on October 11, 2008, with emphasis added:

The same chatting software that, when mismanaged, give us fits in our classrooms, enables us to collaborate in dynamic ways. Students now continue fiery classroom debates when they get home from school. They now walk each other through difficult readings of “The Odyssey” and “Hamlet” and return to class with stronger understandings. Our projects are regularly published — which leads to comments and ongoing conversations with the outside world.

As important as it is for students to expand their sense of community and learn to collaborate — it is more crucial that they learn how to sift thoughtfully through increasing amounts of information. The Internet presents a unique challenge to scholarship — many of the questions that once required extensive research can now be answered with 10-minute visits to Google. The issue now is distinguishing between rich resources and the online collection of surface facts, misinformation, and inexcusable lies that masquerade as the truth. It will be hard for our students to be thoughtful citizens without this ability to discern the useful from the irrelevant.

The practice of education is undergoing a rapid transformation due to web technology.  It appears that the Internet is finding its way into classrooms because it effectively facilitates the goals of education and it is relevant to the real lives of students.

Using the Internet to enhance the learning experience

In research I have been conducting today, I am finding support for the idea that the Internet and web technology can enhance the overall learning experience for students.

From Donnelly, R. (2004). Online Learning in Teacher Education: Enhanced with a Problem-based Learning Approach. AACE Journal. 12 (2), pp. 236-247. Norfolk, VA: AACE.  [pdf] :

Computer mediated communication including web pages, e-mail and web-based discussion boards have been reported by students using them as assisting in increasing satisfaction with their studies, decreasing feelings of isolation and providing better support for their learning processes (Geelan & Taylor, 2001). (241, pdf at 6)

[...] The role of technology in learning is to provide a flexible learning environment that supports student learning rather than the transmission of ideas for passive use in a highly deterministic educational regime. It is this constructivist approach to teaching and learning which is the critical feature of all successful learning environments. (244, pdf at 9)

From Kwan, R., Chan, C., & Lui, A. (2004). Reaching an ITopia in distance learning—A case study. AACE Journal, 12(2), 171-187. [pdf] :

… the Internet is really useful for presenting the multimedia elements as well as providing the capacity to hyperlink to other useful sites to assist student learning. [...]

As a matter of fact, students with experience in Learning Space or WebCT tended to ask why all courses were not on them. (179, pdf at 9)

A definition of “adult education”

In The Profession and Practice of Adult Education (2007), Sharan Merriam and Ralph Brockett broadly define “adult education” as “virtually any activity for adults designed to bring about learning” (8). More specifically, they define adult education as:

activities intentionally designed for the purpose of bringing about learning among those whose age, social roles, or self-perception define them as adults (8).

As to the difference between adult education and adult learning, Merriam and Brockett define adult learning as “a cognitive process internal to the learner,” and can include “unplanned” and “incidental” learning experiences (5-6).  This is different than “adult education,” which is a systematic, organized and planned activity, designed with an intent to facilitate learning (6).

Internet learning communities

I have been looking at studies and reports related to community colleges and have been really surprised by some of the information that I have found.

For example, in Building a Culture of Evidence for Community College Success: Early Progress in the Achieving the Dream Initiative [pdf]  By: Thomas Brock, Davis Jenkins, Todd Ellwein, Jennifer Miller, Susan Gooden, Kasey Martin, Casey MacGregor & Michael Pih — May 2007. New York: MDRC and the Community College Research Center, in the community colleges that were studied, it is reported (at 18, pdf at 44) that:

On average, slightly more than one in ten students at these colleges earned a certificate or an associate’s degree after three years.

In Using Longitudinal Data to Increase Community College Student Success: A Guide to Measuring Milestone and Momentum Point Attainment By: D. Timothy Leinbach & Davis Jenkins — January 2008. CCRC Research Tools No. 2. New York: Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, a study for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) found (pdf at 8):

… for students who enrolled exclusively in college-level classes. … Slightly more than one-fourth (10,423 of 41,339) of all college-level students achieved any milestone within five years.

But wait, there’s hope:

The virtues of online learning

From the introduction to “Students’ evaluations of the use of e-learning in a collaborative project between two South African universities,” by Poul Rohleder, Vivienne Bozalek, Ronelle Carolissen, Brenda Leibowitz and Leslie Swartz, The International Journal of Higher Education and Educational Planning, 20 August 2007:

Amongst the claims and acclaims made about the virtues of e-learning, Johns (2003, p. 431) ascertains that they can be divided into five categories:

1. Material is made more accessible to learners who can log on at any time which suits them.

2. Web-based material offers the opportunity for learners to explore those areas of the work they find difficult to understand, spending as much time as they wish to with these materials.

3. Web-based material can provide bridges between theory and the world of practice through, for example, organisational sites of social service practice on the web.

4. Web-based learning offers more opportunities for active learning, where students would engage with materials rather than passively receiving knowledge from lecturers.

5. This type of learning offers opportunities for learning activities such as problem-solving and information-gathering skills, and, from a pedagogical perspective, being conducive to ‘‘deep learning’’ rather than ‘‘surface learning’’.¹

And that’s not all:

Student attitudes about hybrid online classes

From “Attitudes, beliefs and attendance in a hybrid course,” by E. Yudko, R. Hirokawa and R. Chi, Computers & Education, Volume 50, Issue 4, May 2008, Pages 1217-1227, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2006.11.005:

Student attitudes towards combining distance learning techniques with traditional lecture tend to be positive.

While students may believe that these hybrid courses have a negative impact on attendance, they do not self-report an actual impact.

Students do believe that they benefit from this technology, but the belief is strongest in those who are most computer/Internet literate.

These conclusions support the idea that the integration of online technology with traditional classes can enhance the learning experience for students.  This study notes:

An important result because students spend more time engaged when they have positive attitudes about the delivery method (Pan et al., 2005).

The “positive” reaction reported in this study suggests an answer for how educators can improve motivation in their students: design classes to reflect how students use the Internet.  The conclusion that the perception of a “benefit” from the hybrid course increases in students with greater computer and Internet literacy seems to underline this idea.

These conclusions suggest that efforts to increase computer and Internet literacy can improve the student learning experience in hybrid online courses.  For example, this study notes that “students who are most appreciative of these additions to a course are those with the best computer skills” and:

… students tend to recommend a greater level of computer/Internet preparedness prior to taking online courses (Richards & Ridley, 1997). In other words, helping students to develop strong computer/Internet skills prior to taking distance education classes may be critically important to improving student engagement.

learn something new every day

From the Times Online on September 29, 2008:

Many believe the world wide web and the internet are the same thing, but the internet is actually a massive network of networks, which connects millions of computers together globally, and the web is an information-sharing model built on top of the internet, which allows information to be accessed over the medium of the internet.

“separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”

Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka made this abundantly clear in 1954.  My hope is that it can serve as a warning against efforts to segregate online components of education from “regular” and “traditional” classwork.

From the Associated Press on September 25, 2008:

Nearly 3.5 million students nationwide took at least one online course during the fall 2006 term, according to a report last year by the Sloan Consortium.

The integration of the Internet into the school environment is proceeding at a very slow pace.  One barrier to the evolution of the classroom may be philosophical – instead of a movement to incorporate online technology into all classes where it is appropriate, there instead appears to be a sharp distinction made between online and offline classes.

The Associated Press reports that the University of Illinois has had difficulty with the successful development of an online education program:

An $8.9 million online campus launched by the University of Illinois nine months ago has had disappointing enrollment and fewer course offerings than expected, but the man who created it isn’t giving up.

Instead, University of Illinois President Joseph White said he wants to turn the school’s Global Campus into an independent, accredited university to speed up development of degree programs.

So far 121 students have enrolled in just five degree programs – far short of the 9,000 students White projected would enroll by the end of the Global Campus’ first five years.

When it started offering classes in January, White hoped his professors would quickly create online programs in business, engineering and other high-demand fields.

For the most part, “That has not happened,” White told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday. “I’m not mad at anybody about that. I think we’ve come to realize that we have a university faculty that is at capacity.”

I think that it could be a mistake to move the University of Illinois Global Campus into a separate program, because it appears to be a serious mistake for the University of Illinois to segregate online learning from the general college experience.  If this philosophy is taken to the extreme and no resources are invested in bringing online technology into on-campus classrooms, the University of Illinois could lose a competitive edge as other universities bring their classes into the 21st century.

I find it interesting that President White believes that the current failures of the Global Campus are due to “a university faculty that is at full capacity.”  If online technology was being regularly incorporated into traditional on-campus classes, it would be easier for faculty to develop online education programs, because the development work would overlap with and build on the work already required for their “regular” classes.  The transition to fully online classes for appropriate subjects would be a lot easier in an environment that is already moving online.

Maybe Nicholas Carr is part of the problem

On September 25, 2008, Nicholas Carr appeared on the Colbert Report to promote his new book.  In the interview, he speaks of an evolution of the Internet into a “worldwide computer,” and talks about the increase of people using the Internet as an online storage space instead of their individual computer.  Carr says that the Internet and Google are useful, but he also sees a problem due to how much the Internet is used.  Carr’s concern is that people are starting to think like the Internet. That we are ’starting to act like the tools we use,’ and “think like a computer,” “jumping from piece of information to piece of information.”

Carr thinks that we are losing the ability to think deeply because of the Internet.  I find this laughable.

Carr believes that the Internet has caused people to lose the ability to stay focused on one thing, that we are losing our ability to concentrate, reflect, and contemplate.  He is concerned we are losing our ability to “slow down and think.” Carr suggests that “we’ve become so connected to everything, that we are actually disconnected from any one thing.”  He says he has noticed that when he reads a paper book, “something that used to come naturally,” he finds that his mind ’starts to wander’ and wants to do what it does when he is online.

The Internet does allow us to quickly jump quickly between sources of information.  But this is not the same thing as the “superficial relationship with information” that Carr is afraid of.  The Internet permits the exact opposite of a “superficial relationship,” because it allows an individual to look beyond any one source of information, and produce their own connections between the material they find.  The investigation of related information is a form of deeper thinking.  It can be the contemplation of one subject, at a far deeper level.

Why the Internet will help protect voting rights

The Internet allows people to not only identify “mistakenly published information,” but to also rapidly tell other people about such “mistakes.”  The monopoly on information is over – any agency that attempts to misinform students people about their voting rights can be publicly exposed, and the damage inflicted by their “mistake” can be corrected by the rapid distribution of accurate information.

According to McClatchy on September 24, 2008, there have been several recent reports about college students being provided with “incorrect information” about their voting rights:

Balink issued a statement saying his office had misinterpreted state law and “mistakenly published information that was incorrect.”

Balink’s actions are the latest of several instances in which local election officials, including some in Virginia and South Carolina, have discouraged college students from voting in a year in which legions of students have thrown their energy behind Obama.

… Greenbaum noted that Virginia’s elections board recently revised language on its Internet site that discouraged students from registering after reports of a similar episode at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va.

The New York Times reported Sept. 8 that a local registrar had issued two releases that incorrectly suggested dire consequences for the university’s students who registered to vote there, including the possibility they no longer could be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns.

My first reaction to this news was a thought about how online networks of students can counteract these kinds of “mistakes.”  For example, this is the link to the New Voters Project that is mentioned in the McClatchy article.  This organization  is active on Facebook and MySpace, and has collected information about voting rights, links to state election offices, as well as a list of related links.