Teaching with Technology

http://www.usdla.org
All,
I have chosen the U.S. Distance Learning Association (USDLA) journal; Distance Learning, for Educators, Trainers, and Leaders, as my selection for CTCH 603. At first glance, the journal looked kind of “cheesy” (lots of pictures/advertising, short 2-3 page articles, etc), so I didn’t think it would fly. However, once I dived in, there were a number of articles that grabbed my attention. Specifically, “Establishing Remote Military Leaning Centers”; something I experienced first-hand while stationed in Germany in the 1980’s. Also, there were studies on teaching subjects with traditionally high levels of student/teacher interaction in the classroom and the difficulties in presenting these same subjects in a distance learning environment (more on these two topics in the weeks to come).
The USDLA was established in 1987 as the first non-profit Distance Learning association in the United States formed to support distance learning research, development and praxis across the complete arena of education, training and communications. The learning communities that USDLA address are K-12, higher education, continuing education, corporate training, military, government, home schooling and telemedicine. Importantly, USDLA focuses on all legislation impacting the distance learning community and its constituents. The USDLA Public Policy Committee is tackling a number of issues currently of interest to the distance learning community:
• Require that teacher preparation institutions restructure pre-service and in-service programs to recognize the importance of integrating communication and information technologies in education.
• Maintain the protections for copyright holders and users that exist in current legislation and agreements to include the revision of legislation to accommodate digital technology.
• Continue to support programs, certificates, and course content development, including distance learning delivery options, to ensure quality learning materials will be available over the nation’s expanding educational networks.
The USDLA Journal, also established in 1987 was the first academic, peer reviewed, national journal dedicated solely to distance learning. The journal transitioned to being on-line in 1999 and is dedicated to the dissemination of ongoing distance learning research both in the United States and internationally. The association’s web-site is easy to navigate and has a number of drop-down menus to explore. Menu items include: free resource downloads, free downloads of professional papers and white papers on distance learning, a distance learning glossary and more. Today, distance learning is providing undergraduate and advanced degrees to students around the world. Corporate America is using distance learning to retrain many of today’s workers to keep up with the pace of technological changes. I have a strong interest in supporting the military overseas through distance learning and feel that this journal will help anyone in understanding the intricacies of distance learning as well as provide solid and effective teaching advice. Whether you agree that distance learning is as effective as traditional in-classroom teaching or not, it is here to stay and is worth a look.

For the next several weeks I’m going to be reading and summarizing articles from the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) which can be found at this link. I chose this journal because I believe as both the breadth and distribution of bandwidth increases globally, forms of instruction that rely less on classrooms and more on digital architecture will become increasingly prevalent. As a higher education financial administrator my professional interest is that such courses are cost-effective as well as pedagogically effective. I also believe traditional public and private four-year institutions will face increasing competition from private for-profit institutions relying on online delivery modalities.

My perusal of JOLT suggested it combines methodological and scholarly rigor with a broad, interdisciplinary perspective on the ongoing evolution of online teaching. You, too, can apply to review articles for JOLT – but they might say no depending on your qualifications. That seems like a balanced approach to me. It also struck me in looking at different journals that we have come a long way in a short time in dealing with digital interfaces. One journal article from the 1990’s, not all that long ago, spent what today would seem an inordinate amount of time explaining hyperlinks. Click on the hyperlink and it will take you somewhere else. Well duh. Except, I remember when hyperlinks were a new and exciting concept teeming with unrealized prospects and possibilities and the need of explanation. So too with much of what we’re learning about online learning: it’s new, and teeming with unrealized future realities that we shall soon be experiencing for ourselves.

How will those experiences and new realities come to pass? Yesterday I cited a comment that suggested students might pick up an iPad in lieu of paying for a college course. Armed with an iPad, the writer suggested, students could teach themselves; after all the iPad has the same (or more) information for less cost. And it’s probably true that just as Abraham Lincoln taught himself the law without the benefit of formal instruction, many students could realize efficacious educational experiences – enrichment or skill acquisition – utilizing only an iPad. It may “work” for the rare student. If it does, work that is, understanding how and why it works is part of the work of JOLT, which also works to describe and explain how online learning can work for much larger groups than a few.

Which brings up a concluding thought about technologies. They are both the creations of fellow humans and, through social media, our own evolving and interactive creations together. The characteristics of digital technologies reflect our own human capacities and capabilities: we both shape and are shaped by the technologies we have created. Digital technology is in its infancy and so too is our understanding of how it can and might contribute to our learning and education.

Gil Brown

CTCH 603 will read a chapter of this book; my Teaching the Reading of Literature course is reading the entire work.  I’m only just beginning, but it is very interesting so far.  Gee claims that if the learning principles embedded in games (particularly the long, hard ones that kids learn in order to win) were applied to curricula, students would be more enthused about school.  There also is a brief discussion about boys who modify video games as  a “route  to IT careers” and girls who presumably lose out on these opportunities because they tend to view gaming as “unfeminine” — much like they do math and science.  But not everyone has to be an IT expert, right?  Hmmm.  It’s a quick read at only 219 pages and highly recommended.

Fe Bencosme

I have been researching questions about distance education (DE) for several years as part of my role in supporting online education in The Volgenau School of IT & Engineering at George Mason University. While some of my questions have involved the selection of systems to support distance learning, most have been in response to queries from our faculty to which I wanted to cite academic research to justify my responses.

As an example, several faculty members were convinced that they had to use a video camera and transmit an image of them delivering the lecture for a successful distance learning experience. Although I suspected that this was an inaccurate assumption, I needed to find some supporting documents. After searching using multiple key words, I was able to locate documents supporting my theory. The research showed that having a video transmission of the professor delivering the lecture induced the students to enter a passive mode akin to watching a television program while lectures delivered without the video forced the students to watch the lecture slides and become more engaged. Other questions have been about lecture length in asynchronous delivery models and the impact of online students in a live classroom setting.

As I was doing this research, I noticed that the “American Journal of Distance Education” (AJDE) consistently appeared in my searches and I started to peruse the journal issues looking for articles of interest. The journal has been published for over 20 years with the same editor, Michael Moore, and this has produced a journal with a consistency of purpose not found in many other scholarly journals.  I have also enjoyed reading the editorials as many have broken new ground in distance education theory. One major breakthrough, which has been expanded by several others writing in the field, discusses the importance of interactions between different elements such as learner-teacher or learner-learner.

Another aspect I appreciate about reading AJDE is that the articles seem focused more on learning and people issues than on technology. Many articles I have read in other journals seem to be more focused on the technology than on the student or on the learning process. I perceive technology as a tool and am much more interested in ways to use those tools to further the educational process. Thus, a discussion of the learner-software interaction is of more interest to me than a discussion of how efficient a software package may be at transmitting information. My primary interest is in learning ways that distance learning techniques can help students become more engaged with the subject – and how those methods might also be integrated into a normal “live” classroom.

Thus, I intend to highlight and review selected articles from the “American Journal of Distance Education” this semester. I hope to find articles that will remove some of the concerns I have heard about distance education and demonstrate how this type of education can be beneficial to the learning process in ways that go beyond the normal discussions about campus resource utilization and student access.

Jonathan G.

This semester I will be blogging about articles I have read from “Language Learning & Technology Journal” (LLT). You can find the journal at: http://llt.msu.edu. The editors are: Dorothy Chun, University of California, Santa Barbara and Irene Thompson, George Washington University (Emerita). Publication began of this refereed journal in July 1997. Its aim is to “disseminate research to foreign and second language educators in the US and around the world on issues related to technology and second language education”. Presently, the journal is published three times a year in February, June and October.
The University of Hawai’i National Foreign Language Resource Center sponsors and publishes the journal in concert with the Michigan State University Center for Language Education And Research (CLEAR), and co-sponsor the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL).
I was drawn to this journal because of its focus on foreign and second languages is in line with my program of study which is a Master’s degree in college teaching English as a Second Language (ESL). Reading articles from this journal should provide me with insights on technological applications for language teaching. The journal is dedicated to the technological perspective of language teaching and there is a bounty of current articles on this topic.
This on-line journal is free making it convenient to read its articles and scan its archives. Authors of the journal’s articles are from universities around the world providing for a broad scope of information and perspectives. For example, the October 2009 issue boasts authors and reviewers from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden as well as Brigham and Young University, United States and Georgetown University, United States.
Because this is a refereed journal the articles have been well reviewed by experts in the field. Initially, I was not certain of the definition of a refereed journal. According to CalPoly Library Services, Robert E. Kennedy Library, “Peer-reviewed journals (also called refereed journals) are scholarly journals that only publish articles that have passed through this review process. The review process helps ensure that the published articles reflect solid scholarship in their fields” (http://lib.calpoly.edu/research/guides/peer.html). Additionally, the articles I briefly reviewed were very well referenced further strengthening the argument for credibility.
Another attractive feature is the breadth of topics covered. Recent articles cover a range of topics and technologies as we can see from the following titles: “Podcasting: An Effective Tool for Honing Language Students’ Pronunciation”?; “The Effects of Computer-assisted Pronunciation Readings on ESL Learners’ Use of Pausing, Stress, Intonation, and Overall Comprehensibility”; Measuring Oral Proficiency in Distance, Face-to-Face, and Blended Classrooms; and “The Effects of Captioning Videos Used for Foreign Language Listening Activities”.
The multitude of current articles from a wide range of international authors discussing a variety of technologies and their applications in the field of language and second language teaching will provide me with a rich source of material to read and report about in this blog. I look forward to expanding my knowledge and hopeful yours, dear reader, with my readings and subsequent journal entries. Thank you for reading.