Jinjie Zheng

Search-to-Write Summer 2009

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:13:14 +0000

Please click here to indicate your interest in our Search-to-Write study.

Social presence of an online course: how important is it?

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:38:54 +0000

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.

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”.

Many studies claimed strong correlations between social presence and students’ learning satisfaction. Students’ learning satisfaction differs from the actual learning outcome of the online course. As Capsi and Blau did, many studies treated “perceived learning” as a way to gauge student’s actual learning outcome. The student’s self-estimation of what he has learned from an experience could be largely different from the learning objectives and goals set up the instructors. The trick is that most online courses have qualitative learning outcomes instead of quantitative learning outcomes. For example, TE 150 online requires students to acquire an understanding of different learning theories. It is also hard to measure students’ learning outcome in face-to-face class, pre- and post- tests are almost infeasible, given the nature of the class. So many studies used “perceived learning” as a solution to gauge students’ achievement. I could envision the possibility to measure students’ actual learning outcome in an online statistic class such as CEP 932. Then it would be interesting to know how social presence influence students’ learning in an online statistic class. The research result could become more transparent.

An essential part of students’ learning satisfaction comes from students’ feeling of closeness and connection with the classmates and professors. In face-to-face class, we usually leave a class with a thorough familiarity with the professor and also make friends with a couple of classmates, because smiles and nods ongoing would confirm us the friendliness and accessibility of them. However, in online course, the students and the professors seem only to build passing familiarity. The lack of nonverbal cues and the laborious nature of text-based communication hinder the bonds between the students and the professors. Therefore, the shortage of deep communication and nonverbal communications cues necessitate the purposeful use of instructional techniques to enhance social presence.

Who are your Facebook friends?

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:22:34 +0000

“—-Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”

“—-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.Who is qualified to be your friend on Facebook? A quick glimpse of the word “friend” in a dictionary gave me five layers of explanations:

• a person you know well and regard with affection and trust; “he was my best friend at the university”
• ally: an associate who provides cooperation or assistance; “he’s a good ally in fight”
• acquaintance: a person with whom you are acquainted; “I have trouble remembering the names of all my acquaintances”; “we are friends of the family”
• supporter: a person who backs a politician or a team etc.; “all their supporters came out for the game”; “they are friends of the library”
• a member of the Religious Society of Friends founded by George Fox (the Friends have never called themselves Quakers)”

The first explanation of ‘friend” makes perfect sense. You best friends are certainly invited to on your Facebook. You trust them so much and can’t wait to take advantages of this exciting technology to stay tuned with their most recent stories and photos. How about your family members? You will certainly call them friend in offline interaction. You trust them and you love them. Are you going to add them as your Facebook friends? The Washington Post in last December related a story about a high school junior thought really hard to decide whether to accept or ignore his parents as his Facebook friends. Why this high school student was not so sure to accept his parent as a Facebook friend? He has a smart concern that too much information on Facebook could upset the friendship between a father and a son.

“Birds of a feather will flock together.” This may be the exact reason for you to invite a friend to your Facebook. On your Facebook network, you could have individuals just like you who care about foreign policies, education, military, cooking, pets, fashions, computers, software, and digital photos. They are on your Facebook because you have a great recreational or thought-provoking time with them. They are your information supporters. Are you going to call them “friends”? Sure as in physical world, just beware that the ‘friends” here are more focused on the mutual enjoyment of the time spent together than on the personal attachment. On Facebook, affinity does not necessarily grow among the birds of a feather.

Most of the time, the ‘friends” on your Facebook are your colleagues, high-school classmates, or just a friend of a friend that you met in a social club the other day. You share the common social interaction space and communities with them. You want to be closely connected with them because you don’t want to be late or out-dated in obtaining news about your work. You want to be connected with them because they are part of your old-day memory and you miss them. You want to be connected with them because you want to maintain the rapports already built between them. Are they your friends? Of course, they are extremely important and they define who you are now. But are you ready share your personal happiness and grieve about your money, life, and work with them like Kim did? I bet you would like to have a second thought.

Back to the Facebook’s warm-hearted invitation: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life, I would like to cool it down a little bit.

Twitter Resources

admin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:17:15 +0000

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.

Twitter

admin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:31:51 +0000

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/

Real or Virtual?

admin — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:12:31 +0000

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.

Reading Eco’s and Sane’s articles, I realize that the line between the real world and virtual world is so blurry, not only in computer-based environment, but also in everyday life. I looked at my daughter’s mini Barbie kitchen set, does that call a virtual experience for her? Her stuffed bears, donkeys, and dogs seem also like a virtual experience to her. They are replicas of real life animals, but are designed and fabricated in a way that is more intimate to kids. The stuffed puppy she has certainly conveys more cultural notions than a real world puppy. I also look at her Elmo, Barney, Mick Mouse, Donald Duck. They seem like coming from the other side of the world. They are all out of imagination and originally have no real-world reference, but now we produce the real-world, touchable replica of the imagined ones. The logic behind this, as I understand, is: it really doesn’t matter whether it is called real or virtual, as long as it brings you happiness, entertainment, a sense of power, and good education, let’s have it. Santa Clause maybe another example of virtual experience of the type.
Back in the world of education, I participated in research study called “Math girl: pedagogical agent as learning companion”. The same ideas apply. The study was proposed to have girls to learn math with on-screen agents who were keep offering encouraging words such as “yes, you can do it” “you are such a smart girl and don’t give up” to middle school girls in hope to change their proposition to learning STEM. It is an interesting study and I can see how researchers are also fascinated by the possibility of infusing the virtual to the real.

New Literacy Perspectives

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:10:05 +0000

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.

website setup

admin — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 05:28:09 +0000

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.