Unit 3 Activity 1 - Annotated Bibliography - Revised

Annotated Bibliography - Revised


Realized that the readings in this activity I would highlight two aspects that are important and fundamental:
1)The use of social networking and Web 2.0;
2)Student Profiles (NKI’s) Online Catalogue.

For Christian Dalsgaard and Morten Paulsen transparency is important to cooperative online education. People can cooperate only if they know about each other and have access to some common information and services.
Transparency means that you and your doings are visible to fellow students and teachers within a learning environment. For instance, transparency could mean that students and teachers are made aware of and have access to each other’s interests, thoughts, concerns, ideas, writings, references, and assignments. The purpose of transparency is to enable students and teachers to see and follow the work of fellow students and teachers within a learning environment and in that sense to make participants available to each other as resources for their learning activities.
Transparency is not a given, especially within online education. Students might work at a distance and individually, and, thus, they are not necessarily aware of the activities of other students. In their individual work, however, students write notes, search for literature, find relevant websites, write assignments, etc. This information and these products are relevant to other students. A central aspect of cooperative learning is to enable students to make use of each other while at the same time maintaining individual freedom.
Transparency implies that users to a certain extent can see and be seen, but it is important to find a suitable transparency level. Transparency is also an important driver for improved quality. It has the following three positive effects on quality:
Preventive quality improvement
We are prone to provide better quality when we know that others have access to the information and contributions we provide.
Constructive quality improvement
We may learn from others when we have access to their data and contributions.
Reactive quality improvement
We may receive feedback from others when they have access to our data and contributions.

For Morten and Dalsgaard student catalogues are important tools for showing students that they have access to a learning community. A comprehensive catalogue that provides relevant information about students is crucial to students acquiring an overview of the learning community. Student catalogues usually provide information about all students enrolled in a course; however, if students can access information about the students enrolled in other courses offered by the institution, they may benefit from taking part in a larger learning community. Moreover, a catalog that includes alumni could be of interest to students who seek advice on courses they are considering or on future employment.
To facilitate cooperation, a student catalogue should include information that makes it easy to initiate and maintain communication, such as e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, chatting identities, etc. It may also include information on geographical location (e.g., zip codes) to facilitate identification of potential partners for occasional face-to-face meetings. Similarly, it may include progress plan information so that students can identify peers who are working with the same study unit. Finally, one may argue that student catalogues should include CV-type information to make it possible to search for peers who have special competencies.
Student catalogues must address privacy issues appropriately. Some information in student catalogues may be regarded as sensitive and may require student consent. Some students may also be opposed to inclusion in a student catalogue. The challenge is to find the balance between providing as much relevant information as possible to stimulate cooperation without trespassing students’ privacy thresholds. A viable solution is to ask students for permission to make the information available to the staff, to the students enrolled in the actual course, or to all students in all courses.

For Morten the benefits of Student Profiles (NKI’s) Online Catalogue are:
Firstly, it seems like many students appreciate the opportunity to share information about their online course activities with family, friends and colleagues. Others seem to use the presentation as an online CV to support job applications. In any case, most presentations act as favorable personal homepages that focus on the students’ achievements.
Secondly, the catalogue appears to be a valuable resource for NKI. The users are excellent ambassadors for NKI when they share their presentation with others. They provide a lot of relevant information for prospective students and key words for the search engines. All the positive and trustworthy testimonials from current students and teachers will probably have a positive effect on NKI’s future course enrolments.
Thirdly, the fact that so many serious, hard-working and successful students are willing to share achievements and experiences in an open, online catalogue is valuable for the field of online education. Traditionally, distance students tend to be quite invisible compared to other groups of students. They are so dispersed and so busy with their courses, jobs and family obligations that they seldom form action groups or student unions. Online student catalogues may help these students become more visible as a group that deserves more attention.

And the riscks are: Risks: inappropriate content, copyright issues, criticisms from dissatisfied students, student who explore too much personal information. But on the whole have had few issues and problems.
Paulsen believed transparency improves quality, error correction, preventive quality, learning quality. Also it promotes cooperation.

I was curious and went to see some of the Student Profiles (NKI’s) Online Catalogue (http://www.nki.no/pp/EikelandAnette; http://www.nki.no/pp/SiriKverneland; http://www.nki.no/pp/kvalvikt; http://www.nki.no/pp/skogbergetr). I found it interesting to confirm the profile of the majority of students online (employed, married with children, living outside the major cities, who for various reasons did not continue studies when young and now have an opportunity here to do it).
I believe that the disclosure of the profile can encourage other students.

In his article, Christopher Hill reported on the purpose of Transparency by Design. This is an initiative from a consortium of adult-serving educational institutions with significant commitments to distance education, is based on the premise that a well-informed student—or prospective student—benefits everyone. A key focus of the plan is providing program-specific outcomes data that allows students to make informed decisions about their education investment.
Transparency by Design institutions began issuing annual reports that include comprehensive data for each course of study, including student demographics, completion rates, costs, student engagement, and knowledge and skills learned. Most important, Transparency by Design reports include outcomes at the program specialization level, allowing prospective students to assess how well a program will prepare them for their professional pursuits.
Christopher refers a few basic principles for institutions that really want to be transparent.
• Make distance education a central element of your mission;
• Accountability to stakeholders;
• Responsiveness;
• Faculty competence;
• Institutional integrity;
• Excellence in student services;
• Integrity in marketing;
• Curricular quality.
It seems a foregone conclusion that the quality of online education is related to transparency. For this to happen institutions must make the disclosure without compromising the appearance of the privacy of students.

This idea is also supported by Terry Anderson in his article when he refers “Again it seems obvious that without transparency, learners in distance learning contexts can not compare their performance with others, possibly resulting in anxiety and less opportunity for effective self-evaluation, self-enhancement and self-improvement. The individualized nature of some forms of distance education however may be useful for both high and low achievers who may find such comparisons either depressing or ego inflating to the degree that performance and or motivation is impaired.”

Very curious and interesting is how George Siemens opens its article referring to himself and how transparency has benefited him. He says “I’ve gained much from being a transparent learner. Over the last nine years – on blogs, wikis, and recently Twitter – I’ve expressed half-formed ideas and received the benefit of constructive (and critical feedback). I generally focus on what I’ve gained, but I suspect readers of my sites and articles have gained something from the experience as well. Putting ideas out for discussion contrasts with formal “reach a conclusion and publish” model.”

In the last article, Christian Dalsgaard make an approach to the educational potentials of social software or Web 2.0. He exploits the potential of social software / Web 2.0 in education and try to understand how they can support transparency between students.
One of the problems encountered Dalsgaard was that the use of social software / Web 2.0, students combine the entries related to learning and personal entries.
The challenge is to create a balance between personal tools and tools for collaborative group work that are also suitable for transparency between students.

References

Transparency in Cooperative Online Education
By Christian Dalsgaard and Morten Paulsen (2009)
In http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/671/1267
(Accessed December 28, 2009 and February 12, 2010)
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Transparency in Cooperative Online Education
By Morten Paulsen (2009)
In http://home.nki.no/morten/index.php/component/content/article/3-artikler-uten-kommentarer/86-transparency-in-cooperative-online-education.html
(Accessed December 28, 2009 and February 13, 2010)
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Keynote: Paulsen - Visualizing student profiles through NKI’s online catalogue and student network
By Morten Paulsen (2009)
In http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/2340
(Accessed December 29, 2009 and February 13, 2010)
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Social networking sites: Transparency in online education
By Christian Dalsgaard
In http://eunis.dk/papers/p41.pdf
(Accessed December 29, 2009 and February 12, 2010)
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Profiling Online Students
By Morten Paulsen
In http://www.eden-online.org/blog/2008/10/01/profiling-online-students/
(Accessed December 30, 2009 and February 13, 2010)
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Principles for Improving Online Transparency, Quality
By Christopher Hill (2009)
In http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/distance-learning/principles-for-improving-online-transparency-quality/
(Accessed December 30, 2009 and February 14, 2010)
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Social Software related reviews
By Terry Anderson (2009)
In http://terrya.edublogs.org/2009/01/26/social-software-related-reviews/
(Accessed December 29, 2009 and February 13, 2010)
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Teaching as transparent learning
By George Siemens (2009)
In http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=122
(Accessed December 29, 2009 and February 13, 2010)
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Supporting Transparency between Students
By Christian Dalsgaard (2009)
In http://person.au.dk/fil/16581515/Dalsgaard_Supporting_Transparency.pdf
(Accessed December 28, 2009 and February 14, 2010)