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I have designed online classes and taught a couple of course online. Some of the findings in the research paper I found here resonate my past experience of online course. For example, the immediacy and availability of teachers did influence my perception of the quality of online learning. If the instructors are responsive to emails and I received the response and solution on time, my satisfaction with this online course would be easily met. So seemed to my online students. I usually entertained them more with some streaming videos with me speaking and greeting inside. The social presence to an online course is as critical as what customer representatives to a credit card company. When assistance is requested, it expects prompt attention, or the quality and credentials of the course will be downgraded. Therefore it did not surprise me when Capsi and Blau claim in their paper that “social presence accounts for half of the variance of learning satisfaction”. Continue reading Social presence of an online course: how important is it?
“—-Find your friends on Facebook and sign up to connect with them, see their full profiles, share photos and more.” When Facebook advertises these two statements at their homepage, they assume that you need to connect and share with people in your life, and you are interested in seeing your friends’ photos, full profiles, and stories on Facebook. The halting questions are: who are going to be your friends on Facebook? Are all people you choose to be on your Facebook your friend?” About two weeks ago, BBC headlined a piece of news: a young girl, called Kim,was fired on the second day after she described her office job on her Facebook “My day of work is really dull, I am really BORED.” If the people who she chose to share this personal feeling are her friends, how could a friend betray her and got her fired? Certainly, the girl over-trusted the sincerity of her ‘friends” on the Facebook. Continue reading Who are your Facebook friends? As I am going to write something about Twitter, this post is to gather resources about twitter and education. http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/187 http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i25/25a01501.htm http://eduwithtechn.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/twitter-meaningful-or-trivial-up-to-the-writer/ http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7027.pdf http://twitter.pbwiki.com/AcademicResearch http://web20teach.blogspot.com/2007/08/twitter-tweets-for-higher-education.html Need to nail down the research questions and methods as next step. You know what Twitter has offered me in these two days? Last night, on my Twitter account, I expressed my intent to study how teachers use Twitter in their professional development. Today, the idea was bounced back from a Twitter friend cruthford: “It is an interesting idea. How are you going to find teachers in Twitter?” She even sends me an article about a teacher’s use of twitter in her classroom. I am stunned by the speed and resources I could benefit from Twitter. That’s the beauty of social networking. Okay, some serious writing about Twitter to come. http://pipedreams-pipedreams.blogspot.com/
Last Friday, Doug, Paul and I presented in TE 804 class about new literacies perspective of online reading. Here are some pictures to share with you. I am pleased to find that worldpress is an ideal place to settle my website. It has cool templates; it combines the functions of blogs and websites, it is highly editable. Cool website. Try to stick with it. |
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Copyright © 2010 Jinjie Zheng - All Rights Reserved |
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Over the weekend, I was thinking about the relationship between an online course and the social presence of the instructor and the classmates in the course. Here is what I am thinking.
“—-Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”
Two interesting articles I read last week reshaped my thinking of the virtual and the real. Eco in his genius “Travels in Hyperreality” uses photographs, museums, and design of the cities as examples to reveal American culture of “hyperreality” and realism and psychology behind them. Eco starts from the phenomenon of Holography and its application in NASA and Museums to open his argument that American is over-obsessed with realism. Superman, in Eco’s opinion is a perfect example that “the completely real becomes identified with the “completed fake” and “absolute unreality is offered as real presence.” I like this quote in his article: “American imagination demands real thing and to attain it, must fabricate”. Sane in his “Then and Now” describes the primitive culture we human beings had made great effort to create images, costumes, and paintings so as to represent the reality and to express the common fascination with fertility and the life cycle. The written symbol (word) was recreated to represent our surroundings. Although now, modern technologies empowered us to build theaters, games, and cartoons, there are out of the common psychological motives that we as human race strive to create imitations of reality. In Sane’s view, our craziness of creating world replicas is driven by a sense of power to be able to reconstruct the world as we imagined.Being able to reconstruct the reality is the unique ability of human beings. As the fantasy of redesigning the world exists in human nature, we would never stop immersing ourselves in virtual worlds.