At 10:06 AM 10/9/97 -0400, you wrote:
>In a subsequent message, Jay Lemke pointed out that it was important to
>find good examples of the education/technology mix. Does anyone know of
>such examples?
So far I have only my personal experience and the grant proposal below.
Please let me know what do you think or have any suggestions. I'd
appreciate your help. Especially, I'd appreciate help in finding agency
that will finance this research.
Thanks,
Eugene
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Title: Using discussion Internet webs for developing an academic community
of learners on subject matter in undergraduate classes
Eugene Matusov, University of Delaware, Department of Educational Studies,
ematusov who-is-at udel.edu
October 9, 1997
Currently, there is increasing interest among educators in use of emerging
technology of telecommunication for educational purposes. However, often
this new technology is used only for facilitation of old instructional
forms (e.g., carrying syllabus, distributing lecture notes, performing
multiple-choice exam). The proposed project is a part of innovative efforts
to use telecommunication for development of new instructional and learning
forms. Specifically, I want to focus on development of an academic
community of learners on subject matter at undergraduate level with help of
instructional discussion Internet webs. I will analyze my current teaching
experience (from fall 1996 to spring 1998) of using a new instructional
form (a web discussion carried on Internet) in order to reflect on it and
make this experience known among University of Delaware instructors, other
educators, and educational researchers.
The purpose of the project is to investigate the role of instructional
discussion webs in developing an academic community of learners in 6
undergraduate classes. The classes were designed in as seminars and had
33-50 undergraduate, mainly upper division, students. The instructor
required each student to contribute at least three messages on the web per
week. The length of a posting message was allowed by the instructor to
vary. The instructor required that the messages were relevant to the class
and might involve students' reflections on class presentations, literature,
feedback on the class, personal experience relevant to the class
discussions, information sources that facilitate other students' learning,
and personal and career development.
The students could see all messages posted by other students and the
instructor. They had an opportunity either to initiate a new topic or
reply to somebody else and, thus, continue an existing discussion thread.
Each message was indexed in the hypertext content table. Each reply was
automatically intented. The hypertext content table provided information
about title of the messages, its author, and date and time of the posting.
The privacy of the students' Internet web discussions was protected by a
password available only to members of the class.
Each month the students were asked to provide anonymous voluntarily
feedback on the class that include information of their participation in
three types of the class discussions and their attitudes to different forms
and aspects of class participation. Also students provided feedback
requested by the department.
To address the issue of how an instructional discussion web contributes to
development of an academic community of learners on subject matter, I will
focus on the following questions:
1) How much did students become successful in initiation and supporting
discussion threads?
2) How did sophistication of students' argumentation change with class
time? Did they start using examples, evidence, and references for their
claims?
3) How much did off-topic communication occur on the web? What was the
nature of off-topic communication? What were the students' and
instructor's reactions to off-topic communication?
4) What was the role of the instructor in the web discussions and how did
it change as the class progressed?
5) How did the students learn to articulate their disagreements with the
other students and the instructor in supportive and respective ways?
6) Did the conflicts between the students occur on the web and how were
they handled by the community?
7) What were differences and similarities between these class discussions
and professional discussions of social science scholars (the latter can be
accessed from literature review)?
To address these questions I propose coding the students' and instructor's
web contributions (total about 6000 entries) and analyzing students'
monthly and final feedback on the class. The coding system will involve
information about whether or not a contribution initiated or supported a
discussion thread, who were the author, addressee, and respondent to the
contribution, how topic of the contribution related to the class, what was
the relationship between the author and address expressed in contribution
(e.g., agreement, disagreement, elaboration), and how the author supported
his or her ideas. The purpose of the analysis will be to extract patterns
of students' and instructor's participation across the time of a course and
among the participants. The results will be discussed in the context of
instructor's observations on use of the webs and students' reported
perception of what they had learned in the classes and their judgement
about usefulness of the instructional discussion webs for their own learning.
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Eugene Matusov
Willard Hall Educational Bldg., Room 206G
Department of Educational Studies
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716-2920
Phone: (302) 831-1266
Fax: (302) 831-4445
e-mail: ematusov who-is-at udel.edu
http://www.ematusov.com
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