StigmergicWeb

I’m reading a paper right now entitled Comparing Weblogs to Threaded Discussion in Online Educational Contexts by Donna Cameron and Terry Anderson, published in the November edition of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning (thanks to Stephen for the pointer to this). When I write that I’m reading it right now, I mean that pretty much literally as I flip between the windows for this entry and the paper. I’d usually wait until I’m done reading the paper then write about it, but this is too compelling to resist putting thoughts on paper - er, web in real time.

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.

Hmmm - maybe the choice of an open-source LMS versus a proprietary one is not as important as the consideration of why we need an LMS, and what other tools we might need to bring into the design of online learning. But again, I digress …

I enjoyed the paper and did a lot of nodding as I was reading it, more from my own ideas being affirmed rather than from any new perspectives. I think that these ideas have been around for a while; I’ve written and presented (at AMTEC - audio also posted - and a LORNET research symposium) about the utility of blogs as tools in online learning, along with many others far more intelligent and well-spoken than I am. If you are reading this, then you might have the same sense of familiarity. I think that having what we know fit within an established framework of online education should help in trying to get our ideas out to the larger educational structures we work in. Why not print a couple of copies of the paper, leave them strategically placed in your staff/faculty room and then see what happens? Of course, if you want to blog about the experience, that would be even better!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 14:13 and is filed under communication, small pieces, distance education, technology in education, weblogs, stigmergy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.