Here are my notes from Walter Archer’s session at the Saskatoon ID conference. This is basically just a notes dump, without bothering to pretty it up (lack of wireless access at the conference forced me to do notes in a text editor instead of straight blogging)
See http://www.communitiesofinquiry.com for paper’s that he refers to.
Walter’s experience with online teaching goes back to 1988.
The community of inquiry model includes: * Social presence, * teaching presence * cognitive presence. * how these interact and intersect
Notes some skepticism about the usefulness of this model, but decided not to cancel since Dirk Morrison used it in his present’n :^)
Main purpose of higher learning is to acquire critical thinking, so how is this done in an online environment.
The original project was done by Terry Anderson, Randy Garrison, and Walter Archer. Liam Rourke also became part of the research group. Used content analysis as a primary research method (described well this morning by Dirk Morrison). Content analysis is easy to apply to online learning.
Bing!!! - how do weblogs allow for a greater degree of social presence? Cognitive presence (especially in the integration and resolution phases)? Teaching presence?
Relevance of this study: * could make use of this model by presenting it to the students. Make higher level thinking an explicit objective, and show students how this proceeds within the model. ** provoke metacognition to recognize how the process of the course matches these higher level thinking objectives. * quick and dirty coding of a segment of the course for a snapshot of what is happening. Allows for formative evaluation. * Group at SUNY used teaching presence segment as part of staff professional development ** found correlation between good teaching presence and student reports of course satisfaction
Too much teacher presence can impede teaching presence. Use of students as discussion moderators can allow the teacher to fade into the background a bit more.
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November 23rd, 2004 at 07:04
[…] ouros blogging presentation. Alec blogs at http://www.educationaltechnology.ca/couros Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment Communities of Inquiry website Nine Myths A […]
December 3rd, 2006 at 14:13
[…] Donna and Terry discuss the use of blogs as tools to create and sustain a community of inquiry. The community of inquiry model was developed by Terry Anderson, Randy Garrison and Walter Archer. It describes three elements of educational transaction - cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence - and their use in designing online education. Their original research is available online at the Communities of Inquiry (CoI) website, and is well worth the read. At the time of the original research, they were looking mainly at threaded discussion, but these elements also work extremely well if one looks at blogs as the communication tool. This line of thought actually occurred to me two years ago when I was at a presentation by Walter Archer entitled Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment at the Instructional Design conference in Saskatoon, in which he discussed the community of inquiry model. Dirk Morrison had also used the CoI model earlier in the day. One of my first thoughts when looking at the CoI model was that blogs could be used to create cognitive, social and teaching presence, not in any sort of centralized location, but in a much more diffuse and distributed fashion. Here are my notes from the presentation - Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment. (I also blogged some notes about Alec Couros’ presentation on education blogging, and Alec has his educational blogging presentation slides online) My first podcast also describes the conference - StigmergicWeb podcast #1. (link is to blog entry) OK - back to the paper. Donna and Terry (I keep wanting to retreat back into academic speak by saying “The authors …” or “Cameron and Anderson …”, but that wouldn’t be very blog-ish of me, would it? Informality is an inherent part of the medium. But I digress …) then show how blogs have positive and negative aspects with regard to all three types of presence. One particular thought I like is about teaching presence: This means that the design of LMS based courses tend to exclude use of emerging Internet tools such as collaborative bookmarking, FOAF, podcasting, synchronous web conferencing and other social software and external database systems. Thus, the design and organization component of teaching presence is generally more restricted when LMS based conferencing systems are used as opposed to blogging tools. […]
May 14th, 2007 at 13:57
[…] Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment […]