2010: ASCILITE 2010 Conference Proceedings: Curriculum, technology & transformation for an unknown future

ASCILITE Conference - Full Papers

• Reflection of teaching: A glimpse through the eyes of pre-service science teachers

  Tan Aik-Ling, Marissa Wettasinghe, Tan Seng-Chee, Mazlan Hasan

  This paper examines pre-service teachers' reflection on teaching after participating in an online course using teaching videos of micro-skills coupled with self-reflection and group blogs. A total of 137 online entries were collected from 26 participants. Larrivee's (2008) four levels of reflection (pre, surface, pedagogical and critical) were used to code the reflection by the participants. The findings showed that 67% of the reflection by pre-service teachers falls in the pedagogical category and 2% in the critical category. These findings show that pre-service teachers are capable of engaging in reflection beyond a surface level even with limited actual classroom experience, and micro-skills teaching videos coupled with self-reflection and online blogs can serve as stimulus for reflection about actual teaching practices. The resources that the pre-service teachers used to make sense of teaching are (1) their knowledge of learning theories; (2) their ideas of teachers' roles and responsibilities; and (3) existing ideas of what makes good teaching. The pre-service teachers reflected upon their learning and showed evidence of willingness to incorporate the learnt ideas of good teaching into their future classroom teaching. The use of videos and reflection allowed them to restructure their teaching knowledge through identification, comparison, modification and synthesising.

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• Using digital tools to connect learners: Present and future scenarios for citizenship 2.0

  Sultana Lubna Alam, Catherine McLoughlin

  With the adoption and integration of mobile and digital tools of the web 2.0 era, along with the scope and uptake of diverse and expanding social media, the higher sector education landscape is transforming itself. This is manifested in moves towards a participatory, interactive learning paradigm where students learn through social networks and by participation, collaboration and immersion in digital spaces to seek, share and create knowledge for self-realisation. Students now expect to assume greater control by becoming co-creators of content and by producing rather than being mere consumers of predetermined resources. Worldwide, higher education providers are now seeking to provide learners with a more customized, personalised learning experience. Students also need to become “citizens 2.0”, with the capacity to participate fully in the social and political activities of their communities. In this work-in-progress paper we portray scenarios for learning using a range of digital tools to engage learners and develop critical digital literacy skills. These scenarios are situated in a tertiary level unit called “social informatics” which investigates areas such as e-government, e-learning and e-law and deals with the social, cultural, philosophical, ethical, legal, public policy and economic issues relating to information and communications technologies. The design of the learning environment incorporates multiple participatory digital social tools where students can share ideas and co-create content to enable them to engage fully in the knowledge society. Recommendations for design of future spaces for development of digital citizenship skills are presented.

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• Preparedness for flexible access to learning materials: How ready are university students and staff?

  Peter R. Albion, Birgit Loch, Joseph M. Mula, Jerry Maroulis

  Information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide new opportunities for learning and teaching. However, for students to benefit from these opportunities, they must have ready access to ICT and positive attitudes toward its usefulness for learning. This paper reports results from an analysis of data collected from students and staff at an Australian regional university with on campus and distance student cohorts in late 2009. The surveys were conducted as part of a larger project to identify ICT likely to be available and of most benefit for student learning, and to gain an understanding of lecturers’ attitudes toward ICT use for teaching in relation to the perceived benefits to students. The survey data are being used to inform decisions about adoption of new digital technologies for learning and teaching and the provision of professional development to teaching staff. This paper focuses on the preparedness of students to access study aids such as lecture recordings via traditional and mobile devices. Outcomes of the study are important to inform responses to proposals to make recordings of all classes available online through establishing what types of content are most likely to be accessed by students and identifying priorities for professional development of teaching staff.

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• A model for transformation: A transdisciplinary approach to disseminating good practice in blended learning in a science faculty

  Belinda Allen, Alan Crosky, Emma Yench, Louise Lutze-Mann, Peter Blennerhassett, Rebecca Lebard, Pall Thordarson, Krystyna Wilk

  A project for the dissemination of blended learning design in the faculty of Science used a successful foundational course in materials engineering, where online and face-to-face components were fully integrated, as an exemplar for similar developments in other science disciplines. The team-based process promoted academic development of online learning expertise, and the redeveloped courses now provide a model for blended learning in their respective disciplines, while the focus on benefit to student learning has resulted in significant improvements in student outcomes and experience in all the courses involved. This paper describes the transdisciplinary, collaborative, exemplar-based model used in the development process, investigates the impact on students and teachers of the course developments, and evaluates the effectiveness of the approach as a model for curriculum development and for academic development.

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• Strategically maintaining online learning community in a postgraduate writing program

  Martin Andrew

  Building and maintaining online learning communities (OLCs) among learners of postgraduate writing is crucial to these students‘ investments in creating effective texts for assessment and possible publication. Well-facilitated OLCs becomes sites of identity negotiation and construction for postgraduate writers, as they create authentic texts and apply industry-focused, text preparation skills for the 'unknown future‘ Barnett (2004) characterises as a key feature of early 21st century Higher Education. This study uses social constructivist, situated pedagogical theories of building and maintaining e-communities to situate a discussion of strategies experienced tutors use to develop and maintain effective e- communities for writers. The context of the study is a core first-year unit 'Critical friends‘ in an online Master of Arts (Writing) taught from Melbourne, Australia. This unit aims to socialise groups of distance learners into quasi-communities of practice (CoPs) by exploiting the possibilities for primarily asynchronous discussion within the Asynchronous Learning Network (ALN) of the Learning Management System (LMS) Blackboard. The strategies offer support between facilitators and the OLC and among participant members. Establishment and maintenance of OLCs can help to break down feelings of marginalisation, offer insider support, harness common goals, encourage shared discourse and promote 'belongingness‘. This involves facilitating participants‘ individual and collective learning and providing contexts where it might continue temporally and spatially in real and imagined communities beyond the group.

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• Indicators of engagement

  Colin Beer, Ken Clark, David Jones

  Student engagement has become synonymous with the measurement of teaching and learning quality at universities. The almost global adoption of learning management systems as a technical solution to e-learning within universities and their ability to record and track user behaviour provides the academy with an unprecedented opportunity to harness captured data relating to student engagement. This is an exploratory study that aims to show how data from learning management systems can be used as an indicator of student engagement and how patterns in the data have changed with CQUniversity?s recent adoption of Moodle as its single learning management system.

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• Using and evaluating publisher-supplied software: A case study of an undergraduate unit

  Yvette Blount, Margot McNeill

  The availability of publisher supplied software products from publishers is becoming more common, yet there is little evidence in the literature about how these technologies can be utilised in specific contexts to develop a deeper level of engagement for students. This research project evaluated a publisher supplied software product, WileyPLUS to discover whether it was a tool that could encourage a deeper level of engagement from students and therefore a better learning environment. We also evaluated the resources and the experience of using the tools from the lecturer?s perspective. An evaluation checklist was developed that can be adapted to guide academic staff when selecting publisher supplied software tools in other contexts.

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• Developing teachers’ understanding of molecular biology: Building a foundation for students

  Rachel Boulay, Alex Parisky, Chris Campbell

  Molecular biology often uses participation in active research laboratories as a form of educational training. However, this approach to learning severely restricts access. As a way of addressing this need, the University of Hawaii launched a project to expand this model to include newly developed online training materials in addition to a hands-on laboratory experience. This paper further explores the process of material development and assessment plans. A pilot case study of a group of advanced biology teachers who embark on learning molecular biology over a four-month period through online training materials and working side-by-side with medical researchers in a laboratory is described. Teachers were positive in reporting about the many areas they gained instruction in although some feedback suggested that the initial online materials over- emphasised abstract concepts and laboratory techniques and did not adequately connect to the active research problems or local context of most interest to teachers and students. The experiences of the teachers are shared in an effort to gain insight on how teachers perceive their participation in the study.

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• Blended reality: Issues and potentials in combining virtual worlds and face-to-face classes

  Matt Bower, Andrew Cram, Dean Groom

  This paper describes issues and potentials related to blending virtual worlds and face-to-face environments for the purposes of learning and teaching. By streaming a live video feed of a face-to-face classroom into a virtual world space at the same time as projecting the virtual world space onto a screen in the face-to-face classroom it is possible to merge participation in the two environments. In this way students in remote locations can be offered improved access to and involvement in face-to-face classes, and face-to-face students can capitalise upon the affordances of the virtual world to extend the range of possible learning experiences. A pilot of this technique revealed several potentials for learning and teaching were evident including enhanced remote access to face-to-face classes, increased possibilities for online interaction, and the capacity to leverage the affordances of both worlds within the one learning environment depending on needs. However there were several implementation issues including latency and resolution of the video-stream into the virtual world, the quality of the audio feed, and distorted orientation between face-to-face and virtual world participants. A framework for evaluation is proposed based on an Activity Theory perspective. An invitation for participation in an Australian Learning and Teaching Council grant application is also extended.

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• The use of social networking sites for foreign language learning: An autoethnographic study of Livemocha

  Cameron Clark, Paul Gruba

  Despite their spectacular growth in both daily life and mainstream education, little research to date has been conducted concerning the use of social networking sites in foreign language learning. The aim of this study, therefore, is to examine the use of such sites to learn a foreign language. Using an auto-ethnographic approach that included self-aware participation, learner diaries and peer debriefing, we investigated the social networking site Livemocha to study Korean from our perspectives as native speakers and experienced teachers of English. Specifically, we focused our questions on aspects of socio-collaborative principles and practice. Results of a grounded, thematic analysis indicate that the site had number of counter-productive pedagogical impediments to language learning that included, for example, flaws in site design. We conclude our paper with suggestions for improved foreign language learning through social networking sites.

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• Twitter tales: Facilitating international collaboration with mobile web 2.0

  Thomas Cochrane

  Web 2.0 tools provide a wide variety of collaboration and communication tools that can be appropriated within education to facilitate student-generated learning contexts and sharing student-generated content as key elements of social constructivist learning environments. This paper illustrates this by describing and evaluating an international design collaboration project between two courses on either side of the world. A key communication tool used by the project participants included Twitter. The paper reflects upon the impact of one of the student participant's (LisaTickledPink) serendipitous rise to Internet fame as a result of using Twitter for the project and gaining over 30,000 followers within a month. The project is evaluated within a framework of longitudinal research investigating the impact of mobile web 2.0 on higher education.

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• Future-focused learning via online anchored discussion, connecting learners with digital artefacts, other learners, and teachers

  Meg Colasante

  This paper discusses a learning issue of diverging online communications when more convergent, targeted, artefact-specific discussions are required. It contributes to whether anchoring annotations to specific components of digital artefacts helps build conversations useful to learning. While aligning interaction to artefact has been previously noted for its benefits, here it presents in the context of a tool to help achieve this – a new media annotation tool, 'MAT'. Learner analysis, peer discussion and teacher feedback are promoted within this tool, together anchored to an artefact of learning focus in carefully designed cycles of learning. The paper discusses various educational design features of MAT that enable learning by online artefact-centred discussion, including learner use of these features. It draws from a recent case study on video annotation for critical reflection and evaluation of physical education teaching practice. MAT has been evaluated in this context, but requires wider integration and evaluation to determine usefulness for promotion in a range of other academic practices.

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• Using virtual worlds to elicit differentiated responses to ethical dilemmas

  Andrew Cram, Maree Gosper, Geoff Dick, John Hedberg

  Two significant drivers of change within the contemporary educational landscape are the increasing emphasis for learners to gain effective problem solving skills and the ongoing transformation of student interactions through advances in information and communication technologies. One emerging technology, virtual worlds, offers a range of opportunities for the design of activities that involve problem solving. This paper reports the results of a study intended to identify opportunities and limitations of virtual worlds to support activities that involve one type of ill-structured problem, an ethical dilemma. A scenario was designed to utilise the characteristics of the virtual world technology to engage research participants within an ethically toned situation, while facilitating individualised responses to the situation from each participant. The success of the scenario was evaluated according to the extent that differentiated perceptions and responses were elicited from participants. Analysis of three contrasting cases indicates that the scenario did elicit differentiated responses based on the differences in participants' ethical sensitivity and solution paths, although there were some confounding effects from variation in the performance of actors involved in the scenario. The conclusion is that virtual world scenarios can be used to elicit differentiated problem solving responses from participants, thus exhibiting potential to play a significant role in the development of learners' problem solving skills.

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