Week 15 questions

Assessment questions

1. How does the need for social ability in online learning environments compare with face-to-face learning environments? (Laffey & Lin, 2006)

2. If a goal of assessing online learning environments is to determine the level of self-directed learning occurring (Law), how necessary is social presence for learning to occur? (Laffey & Lin, 2006)

Week 13 notes

Questions on Assignment 3? None
Now is project 4 time. Johannes hates incompletes, so talk to him if you are not on schedule.

Share your project 4 ideas in your groups to get feedback this week.

Since we have no class next week, please continue working on your reputation system design that we started last week.

How long should the literature review for Assignment 4 be?
• Rubric states 1 – 2 pages introduction/problem statement, 5 – 6 pages literature review, 5 – 6 pages methodology

Social Presence Concepts
Q: What’s the difference between social presence and technological social presence?
• Technical social presence is more how people say things in an online space
• Social presence is being physically collocated and the various facial cues, etc. that people read. It is a perception issue.
• Social presence is the “degree of salience of the other person in a mediated communication and the consequent salience of their interpersonal interactions” (Short, 1976)
o Turing Test: If you can design a piece of software that gives the illusion that you are talking to a person and the person can’t figure out that it’s a program, then you win a monetary prize.
o ELIZA: simple computer program that simulates talking with a person
o Big question: How do I know that when I talk with you that you actually care? You don’t have to convince me that you’re in the room, but how do I know that you’re listening, that we can engage in a social context?
o Think back to a situation where you sensed that the body was there but that the mind was somewhere else. Cues:
• Unrelated questions
• Conversation doesn’t track
• Little eye contact
• Answers don’t relate to what I said
• Inappropriate emotional response (e.g., you laugh at something that’s sad)
• Body posture – e.g., crossing arms could indicate that someone is not engaging as much
• Typing when you’re talking with someone
• Body movements – nodding, shrugging shoulders
o What is missing?
• There are many ways for misunderstandings to happen
 Emoticons can help
 Chris’ question: Can we just use SMS language and throw grammar out the window to better facilitate online communication?
 Annette’s question: Analyze the different kinds of messages back and forth. Personal, sensitive, warm, efficient. There are no humor-related categories: why? She thinks how people relate to each other is an important part of the experience that is not reflected in the models.
• What is the minimum social presence necessary to have effective communications?
 Some research would argue that humor is not a necessary minimum.
• Social presence in literature is concerned with subjective perspective: how do you perceive interactions with real people?
• Technological social presence is more objective because you can compare different media and objectively quantify elements of social presence.
• Example: e-mail. E-mail does not facilitate a lot of social presence due to text limitations. Many people have found workarounds (e.g., emoticons) to provide and read social presence cues. People have gotten used to this, and often will prefer e-mail to other newer systems that support more social presence cues.

How do you measure social presence in research?
• Difficult because of the subjective feeling and nature of it
• Methods
o Surveys
• Likert scale, bipolar scale
• Administer before and/or after use of the technology
o Interviews and chat logs
• Artifact (high-level) or discourse (low-level) analysis on conversations
• Much easier to do on chat logs because they are pre-transcribed and are exactly what people said. No nonverbal cue analysis necessary.
• What is the smallest sentence (utterance) that is still meaningful? Must specify how you interpret a line break (e.g., new sentence, new idea, etc.)
• Two articles (Swan, Tu) mention how difficult it still is to do this kind of research because we don’t have the instruments to measure it.
• Q: With simple logs, might you miss the pauses in the logs? A: Yes
• 2009: Handbook for Online Research
o People struggling a lot with how to make online research happen
o If doing dissertation work on online environments, don’t use a variable related to time on task
• E.g., can’t study motivation in real online environment because you don’t know what other things people are doing at the same time
• Dimensions of social presence (Swan, Gunawardena)
o Social context – task orientation
o Topics
o Privacy
o Communication – typing, language production
• Verbal cues
o Interactivity – potential and modes of reciprocity in communication
o Communication styles – producing messages through text or video
o Immediacy – psychological distance between two people
• How attentative?
• How quick is response?
• How well needs are perceived?
o Intimacy – interpretation of physical actions
• Compassion
• Proximity – physical or emotional
• How does a Monday memo communicate social presence?
o First mail you get on Monday morning, written by head of EDCI. Includes grant information, kudos, due dates, health tips, news, new members of department, publications, birthdays, sad news
o What is the social context?
• Social context
 Topics are of interest to most people, tasks
• Communication
 Focused on sending out message
 Formal text, links, pictures, highlighting (language production), jargon
• Interactivity
 Hyperlink is NOT a form of interaction (see Swan – interaction with content, instructor, and people)
 Can add things to the memo by e-mailing the creator
 Links to particular people to contact about things
• Immediacy
 Regular and predictable every Monday
 Due dates
 Red text
 Personal message from dean
• Intimacy
 Birthdays
 Personal messages from dean
 Pictures
o Intended outcomes
• Delineates time to work
• De-clutter inbox

o What is the effect of the monthly memo on the functioning of a department?

Activity: Groups of 2, discuss issues of social presence more deeply

Question: What about when people repurpose chat tools? Have you used technology in a way that is beyond its original purpose?
• E.g., Like button on Facebook
Tu (2001) discusses in the literature review that social presence can be cultivated and cultured by initial learning sessions. What is the difference between this cultivated social presence and community building in an online or F2F environment?
• Community is a larger concept
Stein (2003) discusses the role of social presence in a distance learning environment where students were allowed to choose how they communicate. The results of this study were statistically insignificant due to this inherent part of the study design. How might the results change if students were forced (non-artificially) to use computer-mediated communications?
• Very different

What are the interaction skills that create a sense of social presence in communication media?

How can social presence be increased in online environments? How does it affect student learning?
• “Meet the class” posting – interactivity, intimacy
• Online office hours
• Multimode communication (email, online discussion, phone, etc.)
• Well-defined expectations on the syllabus – context, task orientation

Why is social presence important?
• Predictor for learning achievement, satisfaction, higher retention rate
• People are accustomed to a community experience

If you’re in a community long enough, you can pick up emotions without being told. (e.g., j/k eventually gets dropped off).

Rettie article – comparing texting to fetishism. I am sending messages to let you know that I’m here (selfish reasons).

Why can’t there be a choice in every class whether students want to be F2F or online?

Can you use IM/SMS languages to build social presence?

Social presence in offline/online environments are more similar than different. What are the similarities between social presence in online vs. offline classes?

If social presence is a predicting variable of the success of CMC environment, what variable comes first? What guidelines can we use as instructional designers?

Do users’ perceptions of the medium alter their behavior?
• Yes – you could self-reflect on your own e-mail writing where you try and perceive how others might read your e-mail, and thus change your e-mail writing style

What level of social presence is “good”? How do you assess social presence?
• Difficult, as you can’t tie a particular action to a particular component of social presence
• Swan article mentions a number of instruments, but each has limitations

Has the perception of online vs. F2F changed over time? Do people feel more comfortable discussing things online or F2F if English is their second language?
• Most prefer F2F still.
• Still some cultural differences
• F2F can reduce possibility of miscommunication because you can read people’s facial cues

How do we deal with students who prefer lurking to actively participating?
• Don’t always see. Is it enough for you to know that the possibility someone will read it is very high?

Is it possible to do scientific research on human thought and emotions?
• Practice-based evidence: if you’re a teacher in a classroom for 10 years, you know a lot of things about that classroom. Your knowledge is more embodied, and should be worth something. This sometimes trumps scientific research.

Next week: How would you extend your rating system to include social presence components?

Questions for 4/20/09

1. The HutchWorld paper describes in its literature review that online interactions can result in a decrease in face-to-face interactions, which can thereby increase loneliness and depression. How does this compare to other non-online individual hobbies?

2. The HutchWorld paper also discusses how they used 3-D environments to support cancer patients. Do 3-D environments really have any value for people whose computer and/or video game literacy is not high?

Pugwash Presentation on SecondLife

From: akhanda@purdue.edu
Subject: [Purdue Pugwash] PUGWASH TOMORROW!
Date: April 13, 2009 10:28:37 PM GMT-04:00
To: pugwash@lists.csociety.org

Dear Pugs,

Tomorrow we are hosting our last small group event of the semester. We will be
showing Frontline's "Black Money" about international bribery. Come join us for
a chance at some enlightening discussion, popcorn, and a bit of money laundering.

Also in the pipeline is our last speaker event next week. This will be on Dr.
Sorin Matei on Mass Communications technology. Unfortunately, Dr. Matei will not
be able to be present for the event. Rather than bore you with a video
conference, Pugwash will be presenting Dr. Matei via Second Life, a virtual life
simulation software. More details next week. Don't miss your last chance to
connect this semester with the Pugwash crew.

Finally, I would like to invite anyone on the list to suggest topics for our
biggest event; next years conference. So far leading topic themes are
"Econometrics" and "Ketones and You" so please make some suggestions if you
think there is anything else interesting in science and society!

*************************************************************************************

"Mass Communications Technology"
Dr. Sorin Matei
Tuesday April 21
7 PM
WTHR 104



As usual, bring a friend, enjoy the soda, and see you tomorrow!

-Anant Handa
President
Purdue Student Pugwash

(www.purdue.edu/pugwash)
"The mission of Student Pugwash is to promote the socially responsible
application of science and technology."

Social presence questions

1. Tu (2001) discusses in the literature review that social presence can be cultivated and cultured by initial learning sessions. What is the difference between this cultivated social presence and community building in an online or F2F environment?

2. Stein (2003) discusses the role of social presence in a distance learning environment where students were allowed to choose how they communicate. The results of this study were statistically insignificant due to this inherent part of the study design. How might the results change if students were forced (non-artificially) to use computer-mediated communications?

Reputation and trust questions

1. Could reputation and rating systems be integrated more visibly into Wikipedia to improve the trustworthiness of the site?

2. What kinds of social sites on the Internet do NOT need trust systems in place to be successful? (e.g., the Six Degrees of Reputation site mentions user reviews on drug sites. Shouldn't doctors be handling things like that?)

March 23, 2009 questions

1. In Appreciating the Invisible (Efimova, 2004), the author argues that there are many less-tangible products knowledge development, including process learning, learning through lurking, informal learning, and time spent building personal networks. Do these variables simply need to be recognized, or should they be actively facilitated in organizations in order to maximize productivity and group dynamics?

2. In A Day Without Facebook, the author(s) make multiple flawed arguments for why Facebook shouldn't support a news feed feature. One prominent argument is that the news feed erodes the little bit of privacy that's left on Facebook. The news feed simply aggregates information that friends can already see by manually clicking through profiles. Why do people feel like they have lost their privacy if the information being aggregated is already public?

Questions for March 9, 2009

Here are my discussion questions for the 3/9/2009 class on friendships and relationships.

1) The Cummings (2002) paper does extensive comparisons of e-mail to both phone calls and face-to-face communications. Phone calls and face-to-face communications are both synchronous in nature, while e-mail is asynchronous, making the comparison of quality of communication in this paper somewhat unfair. How would the communications quality of online chat compare to phone and face-to-face interactions?

2) The Tyler (2002) paper discusses that it's important to understand what elements of interaction have the impact of being satisfying communication for participants. Is the answer to this question general (biological), or would this differ from person to person depending on their individual personalities?

Week 7 questions

Both of these questions are inspired by The Online Disinhibition Effect article (Suler, 2004).

1. What would a virtual classroom where students are anonymous look like? How would/could it function?

2. Can effective, assessable education be conducted in a truly asynchronous manner online?

Showcase: Photo Sharing Sites

Introduction

Every time a new technology is developed, the opportunity to incorporate it into educational learning environments. The Internet has gifted the world with a large number of websites designed to share photos in a variety of ways, some of which have educational uses. This post intended for technologists discusses possible uses for photo sharing sites in the K-12 classroom, compares a selection of the major photo-sharing websites, and provides links to a number of smaller sites.

Why Share Photos?

Photos have a variety of applications, both in and out of the classroom. In the classroom, teachers can share photos relevant to current lessons, do slideshows, and make photos available for use by students in their projects. Students can post comments about photos, or create photo portfolios of their work. Outside of the classroom, schools can distribute photos of school events within the school, and students can find photos for use in their homework.

Features of Photo Sharing Sites

This section describes a number of major photo-sharing sites that fall into three categories of specialization: sites geared toward ordering prints, sites geared toward blogging, sites geared toward linking and downloading, and sites geared toward search. Each type of site has different advantages and disadvantages, depending on the intended classroom application. In this comparison, features and limitations will be discussed, including:

Cost. All sites reviewed are "free," but most have the option of purchasing upgraded features or products, not all of which have direct relevance to educational settings. Some sites are supported by advertisements, which can present a problem in some school settings because the teacher does not have full control over the content displayed on the screen.

Registration. Most sites reviewed allow you to view public pictures without registration, but uploading pictures typically requires an account. Teachers wanting password-protected groups will need to have students establish accounts.

Uploading and Photo Management. All sites reviewed allow uploading of photos through a web interface, and some allow the use of custom applications or photo software plugins. Once uploaded, many (but not all) sites support albums, captions, and tagging to some degree. Sites have a variety of storage and bandwidth limitations, from unlimited to 50 MB/album.

Sharing and Privacy. The sites reviewed support a wide variety of sharing and privacy policies, which can be particularly important if using photos that contain sensitive information (such as pictures of kids at school).

Editing. Some sites feature web-based photo editing tools, which can be much more accessible than more complex programs like Photoshop.

Geo-tagging. Some sites support this feature, which allows photos to be tagged with a geographic location on a map where they were taken, which opens the doors for a wide variety of educational applications.

Comments. Most sites allow users to post comments about photos, which can in turn promote class discussion in a virtual forum.

Photo Sharing Sites, Compared

The first two sites compared, Flickr and Picasa, are geared toward blogging but can be used in many other contexts.

Flickr. This free ad-supported site owned by Yahoo supports uploading through the web, a standalone application, photo software plugins, or by e-mail. Photos can be tagged and organized into sets, which can then be grouped into collections within the 100 MB/month bandwidth limit for free accounts. The sharing features are varied, including the ability to link to photos, create groups of Flickr users who can post in a private shared space, a "safe search" feature to filter out adult content, a slideshow feature, and RSS feeds for subscribing to collections of photos. Privacy settings allow full control over photo access. Basic photo editing can be done in Flickr's web interface, as can geotagging. Users can also post comments about individual photos.

Picasa. This free site owned by Google supports uploading through the web, a standalone application, photo software plugins, or by e-mail. Photos can be captioned, tagged, and organized into albums up to the 1 GB storage limit for each user. The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos, photo searching, and a slideshow feature. Privacy settings allow full control over both albums and searches. Photo editing cannot be done on Picasa's website, but can be done with a free standalone application. Geotagging and user comments are also supported.

The next group of photo sharing sites are geared primarily toward storage and ordering of prints. These may be useful in some educational contexts, and can provide an inexpensive way to print photos for educational applications.

Kodak Gallery. This free site owned by Kodak supports uploading through the web and through a standalone application. Photos can be tagged and organized into albums of unlimited size, as long as one item on the site (e.g., a print) is purchased every 12 months. The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos and the creation of photo sharing user groups. This site does not support searches, enhancing the album-level privacy controls also in place. Web-based photo editing is also supported. Geotagging is not supported, but users can post comments about photos.

Shutterfly. This free ad-supported site linked to Target supports uploading through the web and through photo software plugins. Photos can be captioned and organized into albums of unlimited size. The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos, a search feature, photo slideshows, and RSS feeds to watch for changes in photo albums. Privacy settings can be configured at an individual photo level, and photo editing can be done with a standalone appication. Geotagging is not supported, but users can post comments about photos.

Snapfish. This free site owned by HP supports uploading through the web, through a stand-alone application, and through e-mail. Photos can be tagged, captioned, and organized into albums of unlimited size. The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos, photo slideshows, and private photo sharing groups. Privacy settings can be configured at an album level, and photo editing can be done directly on the website. Geotagging is not supported, but users can post comments about photos.

The last two sites, PhotoBucket and Picupine, are geared toward searching for and linking to photos, respectively.

PhotoBucket. This free ad-supported site supports uploading through the web, a standalone application, and photo software plugins. Photos can be captioned, tagged, and organized into albums and subalbums of up to the 1 GB storage limit for each user (and within the 25 GB/month bandwidth limit). The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos, photo searching, a slideshow feature, group photo sharing, and RSS feeds for monitoring changes to albums. Privacy settings control access to photos at a per-album level. Photo editing can be done directly on the site. Geotagging is not supported, but users can post comments about photos. The biggest advantage of this site is in finding photos others have posted using its excellent search engine and large database of photos.

Picupine. This free site is minimal in its interface compared with the other sites reviewed, but is very powerful for a limited set of uses. It allows no account registration and only supports web uploading to single albums of up to 50 MB. Once the album is created, a link is provided that can be sent to anyone. The album will automatically expire and be deleted after a week. No search is provided, nor are privacy settings. No geotagging is supported, or user comments. This is an excellent way to distribute photos that are too big to send via e-mail.

Conclusions

Many photo sharing sites exist, and each supports a wide variety of features. In my opinion, Picasa and Flickr provide the most flexibility for a wide variety of photo sharing applications, and are technologically more advanced than many of the other options (particularly in their privacy controls). Picupine is also a personal favorite of mine, and has a distinct use for submitting photos for assignments.

Photo Sharing Sites, Unplugged.

Additional photo sharing sites not reviewed include: 

AOL Pictures, atpic, BubbleShare, DropShots, Fotki, ImageShack, ipernity, MobileMe, MyPhotoAlbum, MyPictureTown, Panoramio, PBase, Phanfare, Slide, SmugMug, TinyPic, WebShots, Woophy, and Zooomr.

Sources

• Photo-Sharing Web Sites
  
• Photo Sharing in Education
  
• How to Use Photo Sharing Websites as an Education Tool
• Education Outdoors

Clickers as social computing tools?

I received the announcement below about clickers in the classroom, and it got me thinking: can clickers be used as social computing tools? Typically they're used as a way to record responses from students, which are then reported back to the professor and/or students after an answering period has ended. How could clickers be used in a mode where class trends positively influence students' learning in real time (as opposed to ex post facto)?

---------------------------

Come join us for the second session of the new "Best Practices with Teaching & Technology" Series this week. Registration is not required.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE) and the Instructional Development Center (IDC), the series will host a 2 to 3-member faculty panel each month. Faculty will present and discuss how they use a particular technology to facilitate learning in the classroom.

Please join us for the second session on "Clicker Technologies" Tuesday, March 3rd, 11am-12pm in KRAN G004. The faculty members who will present and lead the discussion will be Barny Dunning, Associate Professor in Forestry and Natural Resources, and Tom Walter, Continuing Lecturer in Biological Sciences . They will be discussing innovative ways they've used clicker technologies in class to improve student learning.

Questions about this session may be directed to: Hans Aagard ( haagard@purdue.edu )

Please feel free to share this information with others. Thank you!

Questions for 2/23/09

1. In Scholars who Blog, Glenn (2003) suggests that there are no significant financial returns on blogging when compared with other kinds of online information distribution. Does this in turn result in more pure/real content free of influence by financial backers?

2. How could blogging and crowdsourcing intersect in an interesting and useful way?

JuicyCampus goes offline

This article discusses how the popular gossip website, JuicyCampus.com, has gone offline due to financial troubles. This website allowed people to post gossip about people they knew in an entirely anonymous manner, which "seemed to bring out the worst in people."

What implications does anonymity have for online collaborative learning systems? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Questions for 2/9/09

Here are my questions on the reading for 2/9/09:

1) Soller et al. described a number of educational collaborative learning systems that provide varying levels of monitoring and support of individuals who use them. Is it tractable to create such a system for an entire semester class, rather than just a single lesson?

2) How do the tenants of cooperative learning work when you have students who intentionally go against the norms and peer pressure in order to "be different"?

Week 4 questions

1. In Learning in School and Out, Resnick suggests that "school should focus its efforts on preparing people to be good adaptive learners, so that they can perform effectively when situations are unpredictable and task demands change." Based on Salomon's paper, social learning is inherently adaptive. Therefore, how can social computing systems leverage these ideas to create better adaptive learners?

2. In the ecological psychology paper, Young discusses how engaging new teachers in goal-changing training is a more effective way to promote technology adoption. How could technology adoption be driven from the side of students and parents?

Online Assessments

Presentation Announcement

Come join us for the first session of the new "Best Practices with Teaching & Technology" Series this week.

 

Co-sponsored by the Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE) and the Instructional Development Center (IDC), the series will host a 2 to 3-member faculty panel each month.  Faculty will present and discuss how they use a particular technology to facilitate learning in the classroom.

 

Please join us for the first session on “Online Assessments” Thursday, January 29, 10:30-11:30am in KRAN G004.  The faculty members who will present and lead the discussion will be Maria Cooks, Associate Professor in Foreign Languages and Literature, and Jill Lestina, American Sign Language (ASL) instructor from the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences.

 

This session will be translated for the hearing-impaired by an ASL interpreter.

Reading questions (1/26)

1. In the "Geek Chorus" article, it is suggested that people participating in backchannel conversations are not showing a proper level of respect to the speaker(s). Considering learning styles of the audience members, what alternative explanations for this behavior could exist?
   
   
2. The O'Reilly "What is Web 2.0?" article discusses in detail how some successful Internet ventures provide services that add value to existing databases of information. In the case of Amazon, they started their database with an ISBN database traditionally used by bookstores and libraries and added new books onto it. For recordkeeping purposes, they created an ASIN number that is equal to the ISBN number if it exists, but otherwise is a unique Amazon identifier code. Does Amazon therefore employ "virtual librarians," and if they do, what might their jobs look like?

Using Mac Mail as an RSS aggregator

As I was exploring options for RSS aggregators for my Mac, I found a nifty way to do it within Mac Mail under 10.5 Leopard.

1. In Mac Mail, choose File > Add RSS Feeds...
2. In the dialog box, paste in a blog URL (http or feed) and click Add. Repeat for all blogs.
   
3. To aggregate the feeds, choose Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox...
   
4. Type in a name for the smart mailbox, and create a rule to find messages with a type of RSS Article. 
   
5. Click OK. The smart mailbox will contain messages from all subscribed RSS feeds in Mail. :-)