Frustrating and messy...

What started out as eagerness to engage in a collaborative effort to construct knowledge soon turned into a progressively frustrating exercise these past few weeks. Our class was tasked with creating a wiki, a collaborative article on a subject in popular culture.  The subjects were “stubs” - articles requiring further information – in Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedic repository of information and knowledge.  We could work on our article independently or in groups, but we would all be required to contribute to articles outside our own authorship.  At the end, we would post our articles in Wikipedia. 

Well, I’m not a pop-culture connoisseur.  I’m not really a “buff” of any kind.  Music, cinema, literature, television… they’re all just passing fancies of mine.  I like the distraction and I’ll even delve a bit deeper into something that is more interesting to me, but not at any level that you could consider fanatical and usually not into anything that could be considered popular at the time.  I’m just not really in-tune with the current goings-on.  I guess I could blame that on my digital video recorder.  Pop culture is the life-blood of so much that graces the small screen between the few television shows that I record and watch, and I simply fast-forward right past it.  But pop culture goes beyond that.  It is pervasive in all forms of media.  The fact is that I’m just not that engaged.  So the blame really rests on my inner [grumpy] "old-man” who is increasingly making himself known to all around me with phrases like, “Is that what the kids are into these days?” or, more directly [grumpily], “What the hell is that?”  So my lack of interest in the subject matter was the initial reason for my frustration.  Selecting a subject to research and write about in a genre where I have little interest or knowledge was a bit daunting. 

Finally after much searching and deliberating, my partner and I selected Jake Gold as the subject of our wiki.  Gold is most commonly known (at least to me) for his work as a judge on Canadian Idol.  But through some less-than-scholarly research, I discovered that he is quite an accomplished and well-respected manager in the Canadian music biz.  In fact, he managed the early career of a band that I had more than a passing interest in during my post-dropping-out-of-university, pre-finding-some-direction-for-my-life years.  So now I had some connection to the subject matter, something to get the mental gears grinding.  But as I said, that was just the beginning of my frustration.

 We next set to the task of drafting our article.  But this isn’t as simple as crafting a document in a word processor or even through a web-based interface such as a blog.  Wikis have their own language, their own rules for presenting and organizing information.  And the wiki-to-English dictionary available out there on the tangled World Wide Web isn’t that clear either.  I suspect that it was crafted by a bunch of people in a wiki as well – more insight into my rationale can be found in the next paragraph.   But after much back and forth with cheat sheets and less-than-helpful help articles and videos and after many hours of squinting at symbols and letters in 8 point Courier font, we finally produced an article that looked and read like something you might find on Wikipedia.  And it had some information that may have been of some use to somebody somewhere.  That was until some of our classmates provided their contribution.  Enter the next phase of frustration and much Lewis Black-esque ranting and raving on my part.

As others contributed to our article, it became less and less our own.  We had lost control of the content and the format.  One misplaced backslash by a contributor and I was thrust into many hours of hair-pulling punctuated by exasperated expletives.  What’s more, after reading content that I had re-formatted, I found myself saying, “Is that right?”  And after re-researching I found myself saying, “No, that isn’t right at all!” It was at this point that I arrived at a revelation:  If I had struggled with the format and content for our article, and others had struggled in their contributions, what were my contributions to others’ articles like?  What were we really creating here? Knowledge?  Not likely.

Manuel Castells, in his 2005 paper, The Network Society: from Knowledge to Policy, takes umbrage with the term ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’ to describe society today because knowledge and information have always played a critical role in our society no matter whether we were progressing from mere survival to agricultural sustenance or from rural living to industrial life in cities.  Rather, he suggests we now live in a network society broader in reach and potential than at any other time in our history, aided by communication technology.  And he asserts that we are now at a crossroads where “unfettered communication and self-organization” are “challenging formal politics” and creating a dichotomy: we want to “praise the benefits” of a networked society, but we fear losing control (p. 20).  Sound familiar? Well, it did to me.

I felt the sting of that double-edged sword myself: keen to engage in a collaborative effort with a network of people to construct some knowledge but frustrated by the lack of control that I had over the final product.  My classmate, Ann, provided her assessment of Wikipedia this week in her blog:  “Wikipedia is maintained by thousands and thousands of volunteer authors and editors and we can now number ourselves among them.  In essence, Wikipedia is an information repository by the people, for the people.”  Wikipedia, she contends, is an exercise in democracy in this Information Society.  I’d have to agree with her contention.  But I’d also have to add something that many a politician and political pundit have said: democracy is messy.    

Bigger, better, faster...the economy of the info society

In his 2010 research paper, The Life and Times of the Information Society, Robert Mansell states:

“We might expect an interdisciplinary body of intellectual inquiry to have emerged during the past 50 years or so since scholarly work started to focus on issues around information and communication control systems...  However, …it is mainly, though not exclusively, insights arising within the discipline of economics that seem to influence policy makers, albeit indirectly, in this area.  This has major consequences because it means that many of the important social dynamics of societal change are persistently downplayed.   This process of exclusion of certain issues from the agenda of policy makers is aided by the continuing dominance of what is called here the ‘Information Society vision’”  (p.166).

It appears then, according to Mansell, that the study of an information society is largely focused on the economics of such a society, how the production and consumption of information supports the production and consumption of material wealth. And, the consequence of this focus is an ignorance of the social dimension - how does the proliferation and accessibility of information contribute to or detract from a more livable society? 

But is this predilection toward the study of the economics of the information society really just a characteristic of scholarly research and inquiry?  Or is this a characteristic of today's society in general?  I mean, let’s take the idea of the information age out of the equation here.  Generally speaking, are we not living in a materialistic society, one where economy is of chief importance in all things?

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

The Information Management Age

In a talk for Festival del Diritto (Festival of Law) in 2008, David Lyon, research chair at Queens University and director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, stated, “The emergence of today’s surveillance society demands that we shift from self-protection of privacy to the accountability of data-handlers.” Hmm. Is that realistic? I mean, I’m all for having data-handlers accountable for the information that they collect, for whatever reason. I wish that data handlers would feel the same responsibility for my personal information as I do. I wish, like me, that they would have a moment’s pause everytime they click “save” or “post” or “publish”. I also wish that they would spend a proportionately equal amount of time and money on securing the information that I and many others have entrusted to them, knowingly or otherwise. But, how does the saying go? “If wishes were horses then beggars would ride”.

Bottom line: it’s all well and good to hope that data-handlers will protect our privacy, but the mountains of data held by the the ever-growing hoards of data-handlers makes the prospect of holding all of them accountable for protecting our privacy as much of a pipe-dream as holding the proverbial butterfly accountable for creating the hurricane. So, if holding the data-handlers accountable is a wouldn’t- that-be-nice solution, then we’re left with the idea of self-protection.

The reality is that we are living in an age where we are required to manage our personal information more than ever before. A slip of the tongue is forgotten with time and can even be denied later on. A slip of the keystroke, however, is forever burned on some hard drive somewhere, easily retrieved and brought into the light of day as evidence of not only who you were, but who you are now and who you hope to be in the future.

Now, I consider myself to be a cautious user of the world wide web, careful with what I put out there for fear of what might stick and come back to bite me in the ass. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not the paranoid-type, but I am a rather private person outside the virtual world so it only makes sense that I would be that way inside cyberspace as well. And, truth be told, I’m lazy and tend to lean toward the simple. I find protecting my personal privacy a tiresome endeavour most of the time anyway, so I really don’t go out of my way to make things more complicated by adding even more information into the cyber-cesspool. 

But that’s me. When I read a blog post of one of my classmates this week, I was taken aback. In that post, Marnie writes: “The participants of Facebook are getting younger and younger every year. I was a counselor over the summer, and when returned home it was shocking how many of my campers that were the age of 6 had a Facebook profile. When you’re that age, you are not aware of the consequences of putting too much information on your profile.” No kidding. At that age, you don’t even know what a profile is, much less what it says about you. How can a six-year-old know about issues such as privacy and protecting your personal privacy? How can we credibly expect a six-year-old, or even a 16-year-old, to effectively manage their personal information. When I think back to when I was even 18 years old, I had difficulty managing the information contained in my wallet. I can’t tell you the number of times I sat pondering, now where did I last use my wallet…7-11? No, I stopped at McDonalds after that, and then I went to the library…

But now this is the information age that we live in. Kids have to learn to manage more than what’s in their wallet. They have to manage more than the identity that they are still trying to develop through their interactions at school, first jobs, and other social situations. They have to manage all of that information that they enter into the electronic ether with a few taps on a keyboard or a click of a mouse. And they have to manage an identity that is developed in an e-society that catalogues all that they say or do for all to see, now and forever. 

Jaysus.... I miss my wallet. Now, where did I put my cellphone?

Image courtesy of smarnad, freedigitalphotos.net

Little devices

While flipping through my favourite radio stations this morning, I happened upon this interview on Metro Morning.  Host Matt Galloway spoke with Isabel Pedersen, Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media and Culture at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.  Interesting discussion about how our devices influence and even change our identity.  This interview was quite timely after having read a blog post by a classmate of mine, Ann.  In response to Sherry Turkle's statement, "The little devices in our pockets are so psychologically powerful that they don’t even change what we do, they change who we are", Ann asks:
As I post this blog entry and prepare to launch into the Twitterverse, does this change who I am?  And if so, is this something I want to meet, or to run from?

Rage against the machine

Sherry Turkle, psychologist, professor and scholar of the information age and its impact on society and the self, once wrote, "We come to see ourselves differently as we catch our image in the mirror of the machine". That was back in 1999. The machine was still in its infancy. Back then, she went on to write that our concept of ourselves, our identity, is being "recast in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives".

I think that we have always had multiple windows through which to view and present ourselves and to a certain extent, we have always led parallel lives. The difference in the age of social media is that the multitude of windows in the machine that Turkle wrote about in 1999 has since grown exponentially; the number of people looking through them, nearly infinite. And, the only limit to the number of parallel lives that we can create online in 2012 is limited only by our ability to keep track of the accounts and passwords (and even then, there's an app for that).

Yes, the machine has grown significantly in the past 13 years. You would think that with such growth there would be many corners to hide in, many places to carry on our parallel lives without fear that they would ever intersect. This is not the reality, however. If anything, the virtual world has become more transparent.

Recent stories making the news (and trending on social media sites) bear out this new reality. Case in point, the miscreants who posted disparaging and thoughtless remarks on social media sites memorializing Amanda Todd, the teenage victim of cyber bullying. A group of people turned the capacity of social media to torment individuals on its head, forming virtual posses, trolling sites like Facebook and outing would-be anonymous posters.

In 2008, David Lyon wrote about our surveillance society. With the advent of social media, he rightly contends, the key purveyor of our personal information has shifted from government institutions to corporations. But the events of the past week leads me to believe that our surveillance society is shifting yet again. Oh, the machine is still chugging away, collecting and manipulating our personal information for government and corporations alike. But it appears that those who have been surveiled have begun manipulating the machine themselves. Rightly or wrongly.  

Image courtesy of Victor Habbick, freedigitalphotos.net 

Shaping the digital future...

For the past few weeks I have been getting my feet wet in this new course, New Media Literacy.  This is a bit of a departure from the adult ed courses that I have gotten used to taking in the virtual classroom.  A little esoteric, this new age of communication; something that I’ve only recently dabbled in with this blog and not much else.   But it’s interesting.  And exciting.  And a little mind-blowing. 

We read an article titled The Californian Ideology written by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron.  The article appeared in the January 1996 issue of Science as Culture and in it Barbrook and Cameron announced, “At the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted convergence of the media, computing, and telecommunications into hypermedia is finally happening.” 

This article launched a discussion focused on the question of whether or not we feel empowered by technology.  I posited that technology and specifically the hypermedia that Barbrook and Cameron speak about are not intrinsically empowering.  They are limited by two critical factors:  access and ability.  If I can’t access the new hypermedia or I simply do not have the ability to manipulate it, then it isn’t empowering.   In fact, my inability to access and utilize this new technology, to engage and participate in all that it has to offer, serves to isolate me from everyone who does and can.  And I think that Barbrook and Cameron agree with me: “The developers of hypermedia must reassert the possibility of rational and conscious control over the shape of the digital future...artist-engineers must construct a cyberspace that is inclusive and universal" (p. 68).

That quote got me  thinking of those “digital artisans” that I have become aware of during my short time in the virtual classroom. Those people who are taking hypermedia and molding and directing it in such a way to promote inclusivity and accessibility.  People like the folks behind gcflearnfree.org, that I’ve blogged about in the past.  They “provide quality, innovative online learning opportunities to anyone who wants to improve the technology, literacy and math skills needed to be successful in both work and life.”  Or Michelle Pacansky-Brock, an innovator in adult education, who, through her blog, Teaching without Walls, and other digital venues, freely shares her passion and expertise for utilizing the hypermedia “to cultivate warm, human-centered online learning experiences and prepare students to be mindful users of digital media”.   These are just a couple of examples of how the digital future can be shaped  to empower people. 

Welcome back

Once again, it has been some time since I last blogged.  After taking the summer off from all things educational (although I did learn to appreciate Grand Marnier), I will begin my last course toward my degree in adult education.  The course is a full credit so it will run from September through to April and it focuses on literacy in the new media.  Consequently, I will be blogging on a more regular basis as it is a requirement for the course.  But that doesn’t start until Monday – I have a weekend of fishing, cigars and, you guessed it, Grand Marnier, before returning to more studious endeavours.  In the meantime I reviewed my previous posts and realized that there is a bit of story left untold. 

I last blogged while taking a course in evaluating learning. In one of those entries, I spoke about some research that I would be doing concerning evaluating online learning.  Well, I completed that research and, despite some difficulty that I had connecting to the work on a professional level, I became more and more interested as a relatively seasoned student in the online world. 

In the last two decades, the evolution of distance education has been greatly influenced by advances in technology. The Internet in particular, has accelerated the development of learning at a distance so that more than ever before, distance education has become increasingly similar to face-to-face learning.  In fact, through online learning environments, distance education has surpassed the traditional face-to-face classroom in terms of accommodating all types of learners from all types of backgrounds, all but eliminating structural and cultural barriers to participation and promoting an ethos of anyone, anytime, anywhere. Nowhere within the virtual classroom is this ethos more evident than in asynchronous discussion forums.

Asynchronous discussion forums are the tool of choice for bringing learners and teachers together online. They allow learners and teachers to enter the classroom at their leisure, create and post comments and questions, and read and respond to the thoughts of others.  However, online asynchronous discussion is not without its limitations.  Learning is widely accepted as a social endeavour and learners and teachers 'interacting' with one another at times of their individual choosing within a faceless, virtual world would appear at first glance to impede the sociality of learning. 

Now I know that we are living in an asynchronous world.  The pace at which information is made available and expected to be processed has increased dramatically.  Distance education, long viewed as a means to deliver information and knowledge across geographic distance, is changing at a rapid pace as well. With the introduction of the Internet, the distance between learners and teachers has shrunk dramatically.  Learners haven’t necessarily been brought closer to the institution; rather the institution itself has been redefined in cyberspace through virtual learning environments.  Classrooms have been equally redefined via the asynchronous discussion forum. 

While online asynchronous forums represent a wealth of largely untapped evaluative potential, the lack of a unifying theory to guide their study means that a vision of their ideal design and use is still unclear. That said, the scholarly research of education in general has established that social presence and the ability to build a learning community are key contributors to the development of quality learning events. So, the question remains:  how best to evaluate social presence within the online asynchronous discussion? 

Certainly, content analysis appears to show promise.  But the prospect of evaluating the content of pages and pages of discussion transcripts sounds like a mind-numbing endeavour, doesn't it?  The resolution to this problem may be found in one of key contributors to it: technology.  Applications are currently being built and refined to make the analysis of online transcripts easier and  more objective. With a click of a button, online discussion can be analyzed and grades can be assigned for not only person's written contributions to the construction of knowledge but also the construction of a learning community.  But, while technology may aid in the analysis of discussion content, I can't help thinking that it may be equally well-used to address the issue of making asynchronous discussion more socially present in the learning dynamic.

Here is a link to a Prezi that I put together as a tool to present some of my research.

Experimenting with Voicethread

I've been experimenting with Voicethread as a means of making online discussion more interactive.  Below is my first attempt to deliver a lesson via this technology.  It's also my first attempt at embedding a voicethread in an external website. 

Asynchronous discussions | Online Learning Cafe

Asynchronous discussions | Online Learning Cafe

I stumbled upon this site as I was preparing a presentation regarding my literature review on evaluating online asynchronous discussions.  Interesting and funny.  A pleasure to read some real perspective from an online instructor on the the experience of designing and delivering online learning; provided me a view of online learning from the other side of the fence.

How am I feeling?

I haven’t been blogging near as much as I had hoped through this, my latest foray into online learning.  This week I have been tasked with sending an email to my instructor to relay how I am feeling about the course thus far and, as such, I now have some extrinsic motivation to actually take some time, think about what I am doing and feeling and put it down into words.

The fact is, I’m not feeling too good about my learning in this course, Evaluation of Learning.  Sure, the content is interesting, but I’m struggling to stay engaged.  The facilitation of this online course has been good.  Certainly, I have taken other online courses where I felt that the instructor was mailing it in, so to speak, half-heartedly monitoring discussion and providing feedback, in between ordering more mai-tais at the tiki-bar.  This is not the case here. The facilitation has been timely and balanced, not too leading but encouraging enough.  And, as I said in a previous post, the feedback on my initial assignment was thoughtful and helpful.  So, what is the reason for my general malaise?

Well, Fenwick and Parsons, as well as a host of other adult ed scholars, talk about grounding adult education in the lived experience of the learner.  Adult learners need to understand concepts in the real world.  They need to draw parallels with their own experience; they need to touch, see, hear, and feel the context.  They need to try on learning like a new pair of shoes or glasses.  Put them on, strut around a bit, wear them to work and play and see how they feel; how do they integrate into and change how they experience the world in which they live.  As I’ve tried on the learning in this course, it hasn’t integrated well into my world.  It hasn’t changed my experience that much. 

Part of the blame lies in the course design; I am increasingly convinced that it was designed for the adult educator working in a post-secondary-type institution.  That ain’t me.  Even the course text, “a resource for educators and trainers” lives up to it’s billing.  It’s a resource, no different than that handy little cordless screwdriver that I pack with me on any fix-it project that I have to do around the house.  Heck, it even has toolboxes in the back.  It’s not really a challenging read.  It doesn’t present theories or ideas that piss me off or make me cheer.  It’s just…there. 

But another part of the blame lies with me.  I’m at a bit of a crossroads in my work right now.  I’m not directly involved in adult ed, as I’ve said in past posts.  As an analyst, there’s about three degrees of separation between me and evaluating learning.  At best, I’m evaluating results that may be attributed to learning in a round-about way.  There is some possibility that in the near future, evaluating learning will take on more importance due to significant technological change within my organization, but it’s not entirely certain that I will be involved in the teaching or the evaluating.  But I’m also at a crossroads in my career path.  I’m not finding much joy in being an analyst and, quite frankly, much of my scholastic work hasn’t really been grounded in what I do.  And if I am really being truthful here, what I aspire to do isn’t really clear so I’m not finding much joy in the possibility of a future career direction either.  It’s difficult to ground what I learn in the meaning of the work that I do when that work doesn’t provide a lot of meaning for me.  And it’s even more difficult to ground my learning in some future professional vision that’s at best fuzzy and at worse so far beyond the horizon that it really has no definition at all.  Kind of like trying to build the foundation of a house in the clouds. 

So it is with some trepidation that I approached the assignments in this course.  How can I examine a particular issue in evaluating learning when I don’t really evaluate learning as part of my professional life?  I can’t even start from the premise of, “When I graduate and get a job teaching, I think that this issue will be important to me….”.  I’m not so sure that I want to teach, in the traditional sense of the word.  But I do know that learning is something that I enjoy.  And teaching in the broader sense is something that I enjoy and believe will be an essential component of any work that I do in the future.  Whether it pays for the food on the table or not, teaching nourishes me, as does learning.  So it is from this premise that I approach the assignments in this course.

Feedback from my first assignment - refining my research question

I received my first assignment back from my instructor.  For those of you who are interested in such things as marks, I’ll tell you that I did well and that’s as much as I’ll say.  Because, really, that shouldn’t be the point.  Okay, I admit it.  It’s the first thing I look at when I get the rubric back.  Anyway, what is really important is the feedback that I received from my instructor.  You’ll recall from a previous post that this assignment was to be a sort of staging exercise where I was tasked to devise a research question that would be the focus for the following two assignments that would, in turn, constitute the evaluation of my performance in the course (combined with a mark for my participation).  So, my instructor’s feedback and guidance was of particular importance as it would be helpful to me throughout the rest of my assigned work.  And her feedback did not disappoint.  I have taken one other course with this instructor, a face-to-face core course, and her most recent feedback was concise, to the point and thought provoking – just as I remembered from my previous experience with her and hoped it would be in this latest course.  “The question is a good start”, she wrote, “but I am wondering if it is too broad as it addresses both the construction of knowledge and the development of a learning community.  If the question is too broad, it will take more time to research than what the course allows.  Can you revise the question to be more specific?”

I gave some considerable thought to her feedback and this is where I arrived.  What I am really interested in is the assessment of a learner's contribution to the learning community in an online environment and the challenges that this represents without the nuance that is present in a face-to-face classroom (e.g. tone of voice, body language, etc.).  The construction of knowledge seems to be easier to assess in the online classroom because there is a written transcript of the discussion.  In fact, some of my early research suggests that there are electronic tools that have been and continue to be developed to measure the level to which individual learners contribute to knowledge construction.  My thinking then, is that the contribution to the development of a learning community (what some have referred to as a social presence) online is really that much more difficult because of the medium.  The medium actually focuses all of the discussion toward knowledge construction at the detriment to the building of a social presence for the learning group.  I think that my research will tell me that half of the battle is to set up the asynchronous discussion in such a way as to allow time for the discussion to be solely about developing a learning community and I think that this will be interesting as well as useful to me professionally.  So, in an effort to provide more focus to my research here is the revised question that I've come up with:

How can we evaluate online asynchronous discussions to effectively assess a learner's contribution to the development of a learning community? 

My first assignment: Evaluating Online Asynchronous Discussion

Since the introduction of the Internet, all manner of organizations and institutions have sought to exploit it as a means to deliver education, training and other learning events. Online learning is fast becoming a dominate way that learners engage with course content, teachers and each other.  Fenwick and Parsons (2009) describe the phenomenon this way: “The move to online delivery is not so much away from traditional higher education but towards using new technologies” (p. 173).  One such technology is computer mediated communication within a virtual classroom, representing a shift away from the traditional bricks-and-mortar environment.  It also represents a significant shift away from the traditional means of constructing knowledge through face-to-face social interaction and discussion, mediated solely by teachers and learners.  This paper will begin to explore how social interaction occurs within the virtual classroom and more specifically, the unique issues that asynchronous discussion presents to the teacher and learner with regards to evaluation.  I will relate my experience, professionally and scholastically, with online discussion, explaining my interest in the subject and the impetus for further research.  Lastly, this paper will conclude with a research question that will serve as a signpost, guiding my upcoming literature review of evaluation of online asynchronous discussion.

The Issue

Online interaction and discussion can be synchronous, meaning it can occur all at once where learners ‘meet’ online at a specified time such as in a chat room, or it can be asynchronous, occurring over time, where learners check into an online discussion forum, posting their own comments and reading and responding to others whenever they see fit.  In the short history of computer mediated learning, asynchronous discussion forums have proven to be the method of choice for learner interaction.  The reasons for this are rooted in the benefits that it provides to the learner and the teacher.  Learners find an asynchronous approach attractive because of the flexibility that it provides; they can interact with the ‘class’ when they want and are better able to balance their participation with other commitments such as family and work.   Teachers find benefit in the evaluation of asynchronous discussion; there is a script of the discussion, in the form of threads that can be reviewed and analyzed.  Learners and teachers both find benefit in the purposeful structure that asynchronous discussion can provide to the construction of knowledge; discussion posts reflect significant thought, often bringing in further resources (e.g. videos, hyperlinks to articles, podcasts) and responses are typically coherent with and build upon themes introduced in earlier posts.

However, asynchronous discussion also presents challenges to learners and teachers.  First, it assumes a level of technical literacy and capacity.  Teachers and learners need to be able to navigate the learning management system and utilize its tools effectively and efficiently.  Second, it assumes that learners can express themselves as well via the written word as they can verbally.  Lastly, non-verbal cues such as body language and tone of voice are missing in the online classroom.  The lack of non-verbal cues combined with the purposeful and arguably clinical construction of knowledge contributes to a lack of dynamism in the asynchronous discussion.  Teachers become moderators rather than facilitators and learners become collaborators rather than peers.  This potential lack of social presence (Aragon, 2003) makes it difficult to wholly evaluate the effectiveness of asynchronous discussion in terms of learner development.  Consequently, it is difficult to wholly assess a learner’s contribution to the learning community via the asynchronous discussion forum. 

Personal Significance of the Issue

As an adult learner, I returned to post-secondary education later in life.  I began working towards a degree in adult education by attending face-to-face classes with a small cohort of classmates.  Over a period of two and a half years, I attended class once each week with this same group of learners.  Much of the learning that occurred took place in discussions that occurred both within and outside of the classrooms.  The discussions weren’t always purposeful, guided or facilitated; they were often tangential, off-topic, and quite often purely social.  When I returned to my studies some years later, I elected to pursue my remaining course requirements via online learning.  Many of my co-learners in these new classrooms were new to me but not to each other.  While they appeared faceless to me, they didn’t appear faceless to each other.  I have found the virtual classroom significantly more isolating in comparison to the face-to-face classrooms that were my experience earlier in my scholastic pursuits.  I have contributed much of this feeling to the nature of the online environment and, in particular, asynchronous discussion.  That said, I have been curious of level of cohesiveness that I have witnessed between some of my co-learners.  And, as a student of adult education, I have wondered how this cohesiveness can be fostered, developed and evaluated in the online environment. 

Professionally, I have worked in the social services for nearly two decades.  Much of the work that I have done, helping people to understand, cope with, and facilitate change, I have found akin to teaching and learning.  In my present role, I am greatly involved in ushering in some significant changes to how we provide service to those in need.  The changes are sweeping, the organization is quite large, and the supports to facilitate the learning are minimal.  As such, we are looking at new ways to deliver training and online, asynchronous discussion is a method that we are considering. 

It is from these two perspectives, as a student and as a professional, that the issue of evaluating online asynchronous discussion piqued my curiosity. And, it is from these two perspectives that I will conduct my research.

The Research Question

Nisbet (2004) argues that “although [the asynchronous discussion group] is only one type of e-encounter, it is arguably one of the most important” and “as part of a wider project examining facilitation of online discussion group interaction, the dilemma of how to measure group interaction” is significant (p. 122).  Further, Hughes, Ventura and Dando (2007) assert that “with no means of assessing the emotional state or responses from students there is a lack of means by which to develop online facilitation effectiveness” (p. 17).  So, while discussion is one of the most significant ways to construct knowledge and develop a learning community, it is difficult to evaluate the learner in both of these paradigms within the online asynchronous discussion.  Consequently, the research question that will guide my upcoming literature review is as follows:  How can we evaluate online asynchronous discussions to effectively assess the construction of knowledge and the development of a learning community? 

Conclusion

Increasingly, we are living in an asynchronous world.  Communication is text-based, presented so as to be read, considered, and responded to at some point in time in the future.  In a fast-paced world that demands flexibility and just-in-time solutions, it appears to make economic and logistic sense.  In the realm of online learning, this type of communication is championed by scholars for its effect on eliminating bias in evaluation.  But an opposing perspective sees discussion devoid of social presence, and as a consequence, evaluation that is less than whole.  Reconciling these two perspectives is the challenge facing the evaluation of online asynchronous discussion and will be the focus of my future research. 

References

Fenwick, T., & Parsons, J. (2009). The art of evaluation: A resource for educators and trainers. Toronto, ON: Thompson Educational Publishing, Inc.

Aragon, S. R. (2003). Creating social presence in online environments. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, (100). 57-68.

Nisbet, D. (2004). Measuring the quantity and quality of online discussion group interaction.. Vol. 1. 122-139.

Hughes, M., Ventura, S. & Dando, M. (2007). Assessing social presence in online discussion groups: A replication study. Innovations in Education and Teaching International. Vol. 44 (1). 17-29. 

WWPS (What would Paulo say)?

This past week, we discussed developing criteria for evaluation – those standards by which we measure achievement of learning.  We talked about criterion-, normative- and self-referenced standards of achievement.  And we talked about indicators, too.  Those specific behaviours that tell you learners are meeting the standards of achievement.  Blah, blah, blah. Booooooring.  I know.  I’m yawning as well.  Your standard goals and objectives stuff.  But as it happens, the subject matter this week was fortuitous, for a couple of reasons.  First, I had to hand in my first assignment on Saturday, so if there was a week where I could half-ass it (in terms of my attention to the session content), this was it.  Second, the issue of measurement became a focal point of my research while completing my assignment, and, through that research, I was able to view the session content under a bit of a refreshed lens. 

Here’s what we’ve been tasked to do: describe an issue/problem from our own experience in evaluating adult learning either as a facilitator or student and explain the reason the issue is important.  Not a big deal, but here was the rub.  This assignment would form the basis for the other two assignments in the course: a literature review and a lesson plan to teach our peers about the issue and our research findings. 

So, what issue/problem did I select?  Well, since I’m not currently teaching professionally, I came at it from a learner’s perspective and chose the problem of assessing online asynchronous discussion.  This idea has been bouncing around in my brain for a while now since I started down this road of online learning. 

Prior to starting online studies, with the exception of a brief traditional distance ed course, my experience with adult ed was entirely face-to-face.  In fact, since returning to school in my mid-twenties, the classes that I took were exclusively small and comprised of tight-knit groups that stayed together over a long period of time over many different courses.  This experience has influenced my belief that knowledge is most often created through critically reflective discussion and debate including all of the nuances (read non-verbal) that such discussion entails.  So, when my participation in such discussions were evaluated in the past, it was my assumption and expectation that those nuances were taken into account as well as all of those intangibles that are the hallmarks of good group work.  That belief was further cemented when I read Paulo Freire’s Liberation Pedagogy model.

Put simply, learning happens when we are transformed from a state of being unaware (magical conciousness) to being critically aware (critical conciousness).  When we become aware of a problem, are able to define and discuss it with a common language and act on solutions, then we have liberated our minds, bodies and spirits.  We have truly learned.  And the linchpin in all of this is that group of people and their interactions.  Not just what we say together but how we say it and it what context.  All of those nuanced interactions that take place in and out of the classroom, sometimes heated, sometimes ugly, sometimes light, sometimes hilarious, but always thought-provoking, always transformative.  So, it is these moments that have shaped my evaluation of good discussion.  And, it is from this perspective that I find the evaluation of online, asynchronous discussion troubling and worth more research.   

My experience with online discussion has left me somewhat wanting.  While it is lauded for its flexibility and its ability to aid in the construction of knowledge, I have found it to be stilted, stop-and-go, somewhat canned, and certainly lacking the dynamism that I experienced in the face-to-face environment.  How can you evaluate a learner’s ability to provoke if you can’t see their incredulous eyebrow lift before they challenge an idea or hear the tone of their voice?  How can you assess the leadership of a learner who uses the tenor of their voice and a deliberate, measured vocal pace to bring together a number of opposing views and develop a common understanding? These are just a few of the intangibles, just a few of the nuances that I’m sure Paulo saw in the groups that he was involved in when he was establishing his theory. 

I had to conclude my assignment with a research question.  And, while I crafted something that would “serve as a signpost, guiding my literature review”, as I conducted a cursory scan of the literature and drafted and redrafted this initial assignment, what I really kept asking myself was, “What would Paulo say?”

Alleviating anxiety

In our session this week we were broken into small working groups and tasked with coming up with a list of strategies to alleviate the anxiety that adult learners experience in response to evaluation.  In The Art of Evaluation, Fenwick and Parsons state that “adults are, by nature, wary of evaluation” (p.32).  When I read this, I thought, “Wow, that’s a blanket statement, isn’t it?”  It certainly hasn’t been my experience.  My natural response to evaluation isn’t wariness. In fact, as a consumer of adult education (building upon the idea that adult education is increasingly becoming instrumentalized as a product in a post-modern global political economy), evaluation, as a part of my learning, is an expectation.  I’ve paid for the course and now I want to see how well the institution has delivered the education that they promised.  And the way to do that is through evaluation. 

In fact, the only wariness that I have is how that evaluation will take place and how well will it measure the learning that I am expecting to obtain from taking the course.  I don’t even think that I would describe it as a ‘wariness’, either.  More of a natural skepticism.  That feeling that everyone gets when you’ve shelled out 500 bucks for something after countless hours of shopping.  You’re pretty confident in your purchase but when you bring the product home and as you open it up, you wonder, “Is this going to be everything that I thought it would be?  Is it going to offer any surprises?  Are those surprises going to be good or bad?”  Bringing it back to the learning context, I question whether the evaluation does what it’s meant to do, or measure what it’s meant to measure.  Is it congruent with the stated goals of the course?  I also question whether or not the evaluation will enhance my learning.  Will it provide me an opportunity to apply the concepts to my own life experience, to provide new and unexpected insights and will it prove useful in the future? Will I say at some time in later years, “This makes sense…I recall a course I took and a paper I wrote/presentation I did/ test I took….”

Fenwick and Parsons offer up a number of techniques to “create an atmosphere where honest evaluation is welcomed as an aid, instead of a threat” (p. 32).  Chief among those techniques and echoed in many of the working group discussions this week was the idea of introducing evaluation early on in the learning event.  Some groups suggested that evaluation should be reviewed in a clear and concise way even before the learning event has started, before the first day of class.  I agreed wholeheartedly with this suggestion.  In fact, as I pondered this concept further, I came to the conclusion that ‘the learning event’ actually starts long before the first day of class, long before I get the syllabus, I would argue.  It begins when I first start ‘shopping’, the first time I say, “I think that I would like to learn about….”  So, with this in mind, I wonder why more courses don’t offer up their methods of evaluation earlier on in this process.  In the course calendar, why don’t they add to the statement , “The learning goals for this course are..." something like "...and the way that they will be evaluated will be…”?  Even if the institution is flexible on the type of evaluation that can be done so long as the achievement of learning goals are measured (another strategy identified in our discussions this week) should this not be explicit in the course calendar?  As an adult learner, this would certainly alleviate some of my anxiety.

Pedal Powered Family

I have just added a blog to the list that I am following.  I worked with Heidi for a short while before she and her family set off on a year-long expedition to circumnavigate the continent via bicycle.  Yes, you read correctly - bicycle.  Now some of you may be thinking, "Okay, that's something that I could do."  Now, consider doing it with a couple of pre-school age kids in tow, literally.  I sometimes wonder how I'm going to survive a trip to the grocery store with my kids, so when I see what Heidi is doing I am simply amazed.  What an adventure.  What a learning experience for her, her husband and her kids. 

Happy New Year!

I'm back.  After a great holiday, it's good to be back.  Back to work, back to school and back to blogging.  I have just begun a new online course this past week that focusses on learner evaluation.  Take a peek at my readings and you'll see a few new additions.   In the coming weeks, I'll continue recording my reflections on my learning.  I will also be posting some of my work from my previous courses as well.