Wk7 - Technology Behavior Questions

Here's Week 7's questions! Woohoo!

1.) The Metzger, Flanaign, & Zwarun (2003) article discusses students’ use of the Internet as a resource. The article talks about the amount of time spent online being heavily devoted to academics. Since this article is almost 6 years old, how has the ratio of academic to non-academic computer use changed with the creation of social media tools including instant messaging and social networking site? Secondly, have students improved their ability to find reliable sources on the web or has more available information made it more difficult?

2.) How does the online disinhibition effect affect the way students conduct themselves in an online environment? If so, do all six factors Suler (2004) presents in his article contribute to online disinhibition or are some of those factors negated in an online environment?

Wk6 - Blogging Questions

Here's my questions for week 6! I just realized they didn't make it up here!

1.) The Desilets, Paquet, and Vinson article concludes, “wiki[s] are indeed usable by non-technical users.” How can we get over the stigma that has been associated with Wikipedia and the unreliability of information found in wikis in order to implement Wikis in business and industry?

2.) The Kajder and Bull gives a good example of blogs being used effectively in the classroom. Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht discuss blogging as a social activity: “Our research leads us to speculate that blogging is as much about reading as writing, as much about listening as talking.” My question has been coming up quite often. How do we evaluate the effectiveness of technological tools in the classroom or industry? Can we simply evaluate people’s opinions on their effectiveness or do we have to develop a means for evaluation outside of people’s opinions?

Wk5 - Collaboration Questions

Here are my questions for this week. I think the most challenging thing when discussing online collaboration is the way that a text-based medium influences the communication. Non-verbals are not conveyed well over a text-based medium and I wonder then how much of communication is lost because of not having non-verbals.

1. How does a text-only medium affect the way messages are sent and received? Does the lack of non-verbals cause interference or message breakdown? If so, How can we overcome that breakdown in communication?

2. According to Johnson & Johnson, there are five conditions for cooperative learning. One of the five conditions is “considerable face-to-face interaction.” How does the removal of face-to-face interactions in an online environment affect the conditions for cooperative learning? Is the replacement of a text-only medium an adequate replacement or should we replace it with a more robust system?

Wk4 Questions

Here's my questions for this week:

1.) Resnick discusses the differences between learning in school and outside of school. Specifically, she discusses the use of tools and the individual nature of the education system. Tools and social tasks were used more outside of school. With this in mind, how do we get past the constructs of the school systems to allow social computing and social activities within our schools?

2.) How does the goal definition between traditional instructional design differ from the goal definition of the ecological perspective?

3.) How can we use social computing to help mediate the disparity between what Salomon & Perkins call “high-road” and “low-road” learning?


Notes:

Behaviorism -> Cognitivism -> Constructivism (Cognitive, Constructionism, Social Constructivism)

Can a rich enough "social constructivist" environment, lead to a stimulus/response similar to behaviorism?

Is it more important to have social skills or broad knowledge?