http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dhdhrj5r_2133ffzqzcr4
2007年12月28日 星期五
2007年12月24日 星期一
Interactive e-Learning Using Social Computing: An Interdisciplinary Study
Interactive e-Learning Using Social Computing: An Interdisciplinary Study Based on User Survey and Social Network Analysis
Yao-Jen Chang1 Yao-Sheng Chang3 Shu-Yu Hsu1 Chiu-Hui Chen2
1Department of Electronics Engineering 2Institute of Education Programs
Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan 320
{yjchang, chchen, syhsu}@cycu.edu.tw3Institute of Management of Technology, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan 300
yschang@nctu.edu.tw
Yao-Jen Chang1 Yao-Sheng Chang3 Shu-Yu Hsu1 Chiu-Hui Chen2
1Department of Electronics Engineering 2Institute of Education Programs
Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan 320
{yjchang, chchen, syhsu}@cycu.edu.tw3Institute of Management of Technology, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan 300
yschang@nctu.edu.tw
Abstract One of the teaching challenges in computer-based laboratory is tracking student progress and giving assistance on an individual basis in the lab classroom. When finishing a lab, students are asked to submit their results at their own blogs and make a notice by placing a link at the instructor's blog. Pursuing the links and checking out students' blogs, the instructor can grasp immediate status of student progress and make informed judgments on which students to walk towards and initiate further interactions with. We also use blogs as tools of social learning. By browsing the selected peer works and the comments made by peers as well as instructors on students’ blogs, students are empowered to stimulate new ideas different from each other. Survey results show that students who took the lab courses are satisfied with turning in lab results through blog posting, getting instructor's in-class interactions, piracy reduction, and social learning. Social network analysis further indicates the degree of the social connectedness in the learning group is high. With probability 65.8%, namely nearly 2out 3, the 36 participants by making only 3.5 comments per person in average, can chase the dialogue links and read their peers’ works along in just a few chained links(all below 7, and 2.8 on average in our case). We also found there existed a few opinion leaders, 4 out of 36, in the group. Those opinion leaders created opportunities for their peers to expose themselves to high quality works which served as live model examples.
Keywords: In-classroom Blog, Social Learning, Cooperative Leaning, e-Learning.
1. Introduction
A blog is a website comprising blog posts, or content written by the blogger, which are typically organized into categories and sorted in reverse chronological order [1]. The number of blogs, bloggers, and blog readers is massive, making blogging increasingly popular. Most of the blogs are like diaries of individuals, or corporate marketing channels for engaging existing and potential customers as well. Because it is easy to create pages on blogs, they have become the novice’s as well expert’s web authoring tool.
Blogs create a context for dialogues between blogger sand readers. Through conversations initiated by bloggers and engaged by readers, blog platforms build a solid base of shared experiences and mutual relationships. It is found that the blog is an effective and efficient tool of knowledge management [2-3].
Blogs have found their use in education. For example, blogs often serve as a digital portfolio of students' assignments and achievements. Most blog platforms provide a personal writing space that is easy to publish, sharable, and automatically archived and empower users to form learning communities by way of interlinkages. Therefore, blogs can combine solitary and social interaction in the learning processes [4]. In [5], it contends that students have long learned as much from each other as they have from an instructor or a textbook- it's just a question of finding an appropriate vehicle for facilitating this learning. It further concludes that blogging has the potential to be a transformational technology for teaching and learning. In [6], it is observed that the blog has many dimensions that are suited to students' 'unique voices', empowering them, and encouraging them to become more critically analytical in their thinking. A number of universities round the world have commenced with the use of blogging tools. However, it is found that few of the blogs in education are used in-class. In [7], the author considers that the biggest advantage of blogs has more to do with something we always have too little of in the classroom—time. Blogging gives back to our students something that many of us often lack—the time to think. Many blogs are, in fact, used as tools to keep students engaged in the learning situations, either solitary or social, when they are not in class.
One of the teaching challenges in computer-based laboratory is tracking student progress and giving assistance on an individual basis while they are in the classroom. We find it of great value to take a look at lab results right after the student thinks she or he is” done” with the lab. The results may have serious flaws on one extreme, and on the other, they are so fantastic that the student deserves oral compliments. As lab instructors, we’d like to interact with students right on the spot in addition to grading their reports after class. To do so, we seek an in-class, computer-mediated communication tool that can not only serve as an online journal and a digital portfolio of the work students have accomplished in the lab class, but also notice the instructor when the students submit their lab work online. Designing specific systems to serve this purpose can be tedious and take great efforts. In this paper, we propose the use of in-class blogs for the computer laboratory courses and re-invent certain features to better the effectiveness and efficiency of student learning.
Browsing the Web has become almost futile: the likelihood of finding valuable information by simply following links from page to page has dropped considerably due to the sheer size of the Web. Picking up the valuable pieces of information from the blogs that we follow would often require tiresome reading, unless somehow we are informed about the relevance of an item. While technology is important, keeping in touch with social science will be just as important. Social network analysis [11-14,17] helps identify the structural features of a computer supported collaborative learning group or community and the relevance that we are looking for. In addition, learning from peers [5] or so-called social learning has arguably become a noticeable subject regarding participation, learning activities and knowledge construction in computer-supported collaborative learning in higher education. In this paper, quantitative analysis will be conducted to examine the effects of social learning of educational blogs in the classroom settings. The contributions of the paper are as follows. First, an innovative use of blogs in class is characterized and demonstrated. Second, with our interdisciplinary approach, we contribute both to the methods of network analysis and to the theory of computer mediated education, and social learning in particular. We complement the educational use of blogs with the methodology of social network analysis to learn new insights about the role of the networks in collaborative learning communities, thereby benefiting both network theory and justifying learning effects in the community of practice.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. We describe the methodology in the following section. Then we introduce the platform that has been used. Evaluation and survey results are given followed by the discussions of the experiences and observations. In the last section, conclusion remarks are provided.
2. Methodology
As a solution to the teaching challenge that the author has been wrestling with for years, blogs have been used in a novel fashion for four consecutive semesters at two hands-on computer lab classes, namely Java Programming and Programming for Internet Applications, respectively. Our approach sees blogs from a more responsive point of view, and has them serve as catalysts for in-classroom student-instructor interactions.
First of all, the instructor creates a blog for the lab class at the outset (Figure 1). Every student of the class is required to create a blog for the lab when the semester begins. Instructor blogs are for posting lab materials in the curriculum, categorizing descriptions of resources and making announcements to the class. In other words, they serve to deliver lab sheets and hand-outs in electronic version. Students are encouraged to read the instructor blog before class meets so that they can get themselves prepared. Unlike situations where students make comments based on literature readings, review course-related materials, or simply do their homework after the class meets, the blog is used in a real-time manner. When finishing a lab in class, students are asked to submit their results at their own blogs immediately and make a notice by placing a link at the instructor’s blog where the lab is made public. Pursuing the links at the “drop box” and checking out students’ blogs, the instructor can grasp immediate understanding of student progress such as how many have finished labs, how good the quality of the results is and what problems may have occurred. The blog is so responsive that instructors can make quick and informed judgments on which students to walk to and initiate further interactions with. Through blogs, this can be done without students leaving their seats or even raising their hands, reducing interferences to others who may be still busy working on the lab. Reading the student blogs, the instructors have themselves better prepared before interacting with the students.
Figure 1. Instructor blogs are for posting lab materials in the curriculum.
We closely examine the important features of blogs in the classroom use. We do so from the perspectives of giving students incentives to get heard, increasing their sense of participation, and building stronger and responsive relationships.
Figure 2. Each student posts lab results on her or his blog instead of the instructor blog.
Student-Centric
Traditional LMS (Learning Management System) is class-centric in the sense that students contribute their materials to the class website. Therefore, while the instructor can publish and archive the teaching materials on the LMS, the students find it rather difficult to archive their materials on an individual basis. The problem is that once the class ends, the students cannot access the materials they contributed to the class earlier on. The blogging approach works in an individual way: not only instructors but also students own blogs. The ownership holds no matter whether the class ends or not. The sense of ownership helps build incentives for students to contribute to and participate in the class while taking the course (Figure 2).
Dialogue-Based
we started to take on blogs partly because the existing platform functions in a one-way “publishing” mindset rather than a two-way “engaging” one. Getting student feedback in a lab setting helps engage with students and creates a real dialogue.
Figure 3. The online “drop box” where students place links to trackback to their own blogs.
Status Tracking
Blogs are a versatile administrative tool to track the status of the computer-based lab students conduct. Blog posts replace the paper sheets for students to turn in their lab works. So the instructor knows in real time that finished what and when. This makes it easier for the student to get noticed, supported, and heard (Figure3).
Checking more than a small group of blogs for updates on a real time basis can be a time-consuming process, if not impossible, let alone tracking all of the student blogs in a class. To avoid having to conduct an exhaustive search blog by blog to find what the latest post is, a feed can be used to subscribe to information so that it comes to the blog reader, rather than the reverse. The most popular way to do feed on the blogs is Real Simple Syndication (RSS) [8]. A feed is actually not intended for human reading, but is used for interpretation by software tools, most commonly referred to as feed readers or aggregators. Aggregators allow a user to subscribe to a feed. Thus, the user is automatically informed when a particular blog has been updated and something new has been posted. All is done without the use of E-mail, saving the trouble of dealing with a mass of messages that can overwhelm one’s inbox.
Figure 4. The formation of social learning circles by creating not just trackback links but also dialogue links in blogs.
Social learning
the intrinsic structure of blogs enables social learning. We have asked students to check into their classmates’ blogs to see what other people have written. In the traditional grading, it is the job of the instructor to read students' works; students are not empowered to take aloof of how the works are done by their classmates. In this sense, blogs have the potentials to upgrade personal learning to social learning. For the purpose of promoting critical and analytical thinking, after a student has read another’s posting, she is asked to leave comment to that posting. We call it the creation of” dialogue links” that are different from the trackback links (Figure 4). By doing so, the instructor has a way to know if the student has done his homework to read others’ postings. To avoid overwhelming the students in a large class with a work to make comments on all the postings except her own, usually only a couple of comments are actually asked, although the students are encouraged to read everyone’s work if possible. To create deeper dialogues and further the opportunities of social learning, the students who receive comments from his classmates are asked to do two things next. For one thing, they are asked to say thanks, by leaving a comment below the received ones, to the people who have made the comments to their works. For the other, further comments about the subjects commented by their peers are asked in response. The “comments on comments” may even sometimes create a long sequence of dialogues in terms of discussions or debates involved by more and more people as the dialogues proceed (Figure 5). Fortunately, these dialogues can be tracked by RSS easily, thanks to the feature that many blog platforms added recently to make possible the tracking of comments in addition to the postings.
Figure 5. Students learn from peers by creating dialogues or “comments on comments” with each other.
3. Platform
The in-classroom blog is based on the platform of Blogger at http://www.blogger.com/ which is now property of Google. Although it is a commercial operation, there are no mandatory advertisements that may pop up. This quite atmosphere is one of the reasons it is selected as we certainly do not like to see students get distracted in the middle of a lab simply because of eye-catching advertising media. The search engine along with Blogger is Google, which most students already feel familiar to use. In addition, Blogger provides a set of ready-to-use templates to choose from, and allows users to make a change later on. This personalization function increases sense of ownership. Because vandalism made to blogs arises time and again, a built-in challenge mechanism to fight with crawler-based vandal programs is adopted to filter unwanted posts and comments.
4. Evaluations by Survey
this was a descriptive study of an exploratory nature. Creswell [9] suggests that exploratory studies are most advantageous when “not much has been written about the topic or the population being studied.” Many people have used blogs, but blogs are new to the classroom. In other words, blogs have been seldom applied in-class, although they are good tools as digital journal while the class is not in session. In the fall semester of 2006, students of two undergraduate classes, namely Java Programming Language and Programming for Internet Applications, were used as subjects to solicit feedback to the use of blog. The former class has 38 students enrolled while the latter has 35. A control group study uses a control group to compare to an experimental group in a test of a causal hypothesis. As a control group, a third class of23 students sitting in graduate-level lectures on electronic commerce, is also selected for comparison. The latter uses blogs simply as a means of digital journal and homework drop-box; no in-class attention is made through the blogs unlike the former two laboratory classes. The questionnaire was poised by a score on a 5-point scale, where 5 (Strongly Agree) represents the maximum score of the scale and 1(Strongly Disagree) represents the minimum score. All the questionnaires are administrated anonymously by a third party without the instructor on the spot.
48% respondents agree that the blog helps interactions among students enrolled in the same class while 18 %don’t agree and 34% have no opinions. 79%respondents agree that the use of in-class blogs helps keep the students interested and motivated in learning, while the remaining 21% have no opinions. As to the impact of in-class blogging on learning effectiveness, 86% respondents think it is positive while 1% thinks it is negative and 13% have no opinions.
When asked whether you will read classmates’ blogs when a take-home assignment problem is hard, 84%respondents answer positively while 3% answer no and the remaining 13% have no opinions. We found that most students will try to get some ideas from classmates when there are no sufficient clues to a problem. The concern of duplicating was first serious. However, when asked whether you uphold the principles of respecting intellectual property and refuse to duplicate, 79% responds positively while 6% confess they do duplicate at least some of others’ ideas that are posted on their classmates’ blogs and the remaining15% have no opinions. The detailed study can be founding [16].
5. Assessing Social Connectedness In order to measure the connectedness of social interactions in the learning groups, a study was conducted by inviting students to make comments on the peers’ works. First of all, a short essay was written by each student who took a tour to a local science fair. The class was size of 36 from sophomore to senior undergraduates. After the essay was finished online in the classroom, each student was asked to browse their peers’ works and make at least 3 comments on others’ essays (Figure 6). Then a social network analysis [11-14, 17] was conducted to investigate the student behaviors in terms of social learning. Three questions were formulated at the outset.
Figure 6: The use of social network analysis for blog based e-Learning activities.
[Q1]
How many student works will be read and commented?
[Q2]
Are there opinion leaders in the learning group understudy? If there are, how many?
[Q3]
What is the probability of reaching peers’ works by no more than N clicks through dialogue links on the works? (N is the number of students.)
We investigated the blogs of N=36 participating students and chased the links of comments one by one. Table 1 summarizes the statistics of the comments found in the study. A distribution of comments is shown in Figure 7.
Table 1: Metrics of Social Learning
Items
Numbers
Total of Participants
36
Number of Comments
127
Average Comments per Participant (C/P)
3.5
Standard Deviation of C/P
2.6
Number of Participants Receiving No Comments at all
6
Number of Participants Receiving at least One Comment
30
Percentage of Participants Receiving Comments
83%
Number of Participants Receiving Triple of C/P
1
Number of Participants Receiving Double but less than Triple of C/P
3
Figure 7: Distribution of numbers of comments versus counts.
Regarding Q1, 83% of the students received at least one comment on their works, with only 6 students receiving nothing at all (Table 1). We took a deeper investigation into the blogs of the 6 students. Two of them were found with no attractive content in their essays. The other four of them were found to be late turning in their essays. In the latter case, it is hardly possible to receive any comment because most of the students were done with making comments. Therefore, we have high confidence that most of the students receive comments especially if they can have their works uploaded on time.
Regarding Q2, there were four students who received at least seven comments which were double of the average number of comments (Figure 7). Among the four students, one student even received triple of the average. So there existed a few opinion leaders in the learning group. Those leaders created opportunities for their peers to be exposed to high quality works which served as live model examples.
In order to answer Q3, we calculated the transitive closure of the Boolean adjacency matrix A which has element aij =1 if Participant i left a comment on Participant j, and aij =0 otherwise. The transitive closure A* of A is a measurement of connectedness of the group, which can be computed by the following formula:
A*= ∪ Ai
i=1..N
The more non-zero entries in A*, the higher degree the connectedness is. In our case, there are 36*36=1296 elements in the matrix A. We collected aij by chasing the dialogue links in every student’s blog. Then the matrix A was coded and its transitive closure computed in Matlab.
Figure 8: Distribution of numbers of hops versus counts.
We applied Floyd-War shall algorithm [15] to calculate the transitive closure and the distance between ordered pairs of participants in terms of hops where the hop count cij is the number of clicks required to traverse from Participant i to Participant j. The transitive closure A* in our case was found to contain only 443unreachable ordered pairs out of the total 1296. Note cijis seldom equal to cji in our observations. The distribution of numbers of hops is shown in Figure 8.There are 117 direct links from Participant i to Participant j for some i, j, which means Participant i to Participant j is just one click away. There are 201ordered pairs of participants who are just 2 clicks away. The peak appears when the number of hops is 3 and there are 223 such ordered pairs. The number of ordered pairs decreases to 195, 67, and 14, respectively when the hop count is 4, 5, and 6. No pairs can be found if the number of hops is greater than 6. Therefore, the study shows that either two participants are just a few clicks away (all below 7, and 2.8 on average in our case), or they are not connected at all. By making only3.5 connections per person in average, with probability65.8% the 36 participants can chase the dialogue links and read their peers’ works along in just a few chained links. This strongly supports social connectedness in the learning group.
6. Discussions In terms of social learning, there is a difference between blogs and discussion forums (namely BBSs).While similar in some aspects, there remain substantial differences in user experiences. According to [10], discussion forums are predominately shared group spaces in which individual voices get heard but are not afforded specific space of their own. Therefore, discussions belong to different people or subjects are interwoven frequently, making it difficult to focus on subjects of interests or join the discussions. On the contrary, blogs provide a platform for individual expression and also support reader commentary, critique, and inter-linkage as subsequent steps. Blogs make more sense especially in cases where there is no strong sense of group belonging or royalty, as in the case we are discussing.
Using blogs is found to simplify the tasks of reducing piracy. While we encourage students to exchange ideas and make discussions, pirating end results from others is strictly prohibited. The tactics to prevent students from pirating in our practice is by time stamping the lab works and making them public on the web as somas possible. The idea is similar to protecting a patent by making it well known to the world. Blogs by design serve such a purpose. Anyone that pirates risks being caught by the instructor as well as virtually every other student in the class.
We have success with seeing students learning from peers through blogs. Traditionally, students turn in their works to instructors and have no easy way to learn how their peers achieve on the same assignments. By browsing the comments made by instructors on students’ blogs and the selected peer works, students have better chances to stimulate new ideas to be different from each other. In addition to teacher’s comments to students, we encourage students to read peers blogs and leave comments there. We find students learn further from peers by creating dialogues with each other. Students find themselves more critically analytical in their thinking when they reengaged in such dialogues.
The study shows students who took the lab courses are satisfied with turning in lab results through blog posting, getting instructor's walk-by interactions, piracy reduction, and learning from peers. Students want to be heard, especially when things they feel aren’t right. The option to keep anonymity if they want makes students feel easier to leave complaints at the instructor blog. Therefore, occasional complaints are not unusual with blogs. Willingness to deal with complaints is essential in the blogging mindset.
Students are given the opportunities to archive the process in the class participation. With blogs that belong to themselves rather than the instructor or the class, students can look back in time about what they learned and how they made it. The blogs remain even after students graduate from schools. With blogs, vivid archives of learning activities and accomplishments can be kept for future retrospect and review. Perhaps sometime in the future, student blogs become essential part of transcripts and certificate of degrees.
7. Conclusions and Future Works
In this study, student feedback is collected and behavior patterns analyzed based on social network theory. Students are satisfied to be able to archive the process in the class participation. Using blogs is found to simplify the tasks of reducing piracy. For the purpose of knowledge sharing, blogs are a viable platform for ideas to float and grow. From the implementation point of view, blogs are easy to maintain, low cost, easy to deploy, and simple to get started. It does not have to be perfect in the beginning, and in fact it is unlikely it is satisfactory the first time. Having student feedback in the process makes us able to address various concerns and make progress.
It is important to analyze the students’ contributions from the perspective of content. Content analysis is based on the tenet that the content of communication contains information about the background and the effect of communications. Future works include qualitative analysis of student comments regarding the characteristics of their comments: whether a message containing academic content or non-academic content such as that related to course administration and social conversations. It is also interesting in the area of education to tell the comments which ask a question of academic nature from those that contain a response to a question of academic nature. Lastly, we are interested in applying the network analysis method to learning communities in different areas, potentially on much larger scales.
8. Acknowledgements the work presented in this paper have been funded in part by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under grant numbers NSC 95-2627-E-008-002-.
9. References
以下略
Keywords: In-classroom Blog, Social Learning, Cooperative Leaning, e-Learning.
1. Introduction
A blog is a website comprising blog posts, or content written by the blogger, which are typically organized into categories and sorted in reverse chronological order [1]. The number of blogs, bloggers, and blog readers is massive, making blogging increasingly popular. Most of the blogs are like diaries of individuals, or corporate marketing channels for engaging existing and potential customers as well. Because it is easy to create pages on blogs, they have become the novice’s as well expert’s web authoring tool.
Blogs create a context for dialogues between blogger sand readers. Through conversations initiated by bloggers and engaged by readers, blog platforms build a solid base of shared experiences and mutual relationships. It is found that the blog is an effective and efficient tool of knowledge management [2-3].
Blogs have found their use in education. For example, blogs often serve as a digital portfolio of students' assignments and achievements. Most blog platforms provide a personal writing space that is easy to publish, sharable, and automatically archived and empower users to form learning communities by way of interlinkages. Therefore, blogs can combine solitary and social interaction in the learning processes [4]. In [5], it contends that students have long learned as much from each other as they have from an instructor or a textbook- it's just a question of finding an appropriate vehicle for facilitating this learning. It further concludes that blogging has the potential to be a transformational technology for teaching and learning. In [6], it is observed that the blog has many dimensions that are suited to students' 'unique voices', empowering them, and encouraging them to become more critically analytical in their thinking. A number of universities round the world have commenced with the use of blogging tools. However, it is found that few of the blogs in education are used in-class. In [7], the author considers that the biggest advantage of blogs has more to do with something we always have too little of in the classroom—time. Blogging gives back to our students something that many of us often lack—the time to think. Many blogs are, in fact, used as tools to keep students engaged in the learning situations, either solitary or social, when they are not in class.
One of the teaching challenges in computer-based laboratory is tracking student progress and giving assistance on an individual basis while they are in the classroom. We find it of great value to take a look at lab results right after the student thinks she or he is” done” with the lab. The results may have serious flaws on one extreme, and on the other, they are so fantastic that the student deserves oral compliments. As lab instructors, we’d like to interact with students right on the spot in addition to grading their reports after class. To do so, we seek an in-class, computer-mediated communication tool that can not only serve as an online journal and a digital portfolio of the work students have accomplished in the lab class, but also notice the instructor when the students submit their lab work online. Designing specific systems to serve this purpose can be tedious and take great efforts. In this paper, we propose the use of in-class blogs for the computer laboratory courses and re-invent certain features to better the effectiveness and efficiency of student learning.
Browsing the Web has become almost futile: the likelihood of finding valuable information by simply following links from page to page has dropped considerably due to the sheer size of the Web. Picking up the valuable pieces of information from the blogs that we follow would often require tiresome reading, unless somehow we are informed about the relevance of an item. While technology is important, keeping in touch with social science will be just as important. Social network analysis [11-14,17] helps identify the structural features of a computer supported collaborative learning group or community and the relevance that we are looking for. In addition, learning from peers [5] or so-called social learning has arguably become a noticeable subject regarding participation, learning activities and knowledge construction in computer-supported collaborative learning in higher education. In this paper, quantitative analysis will be conducted to examine the effects of social learning of educational blogs in the classroom settings. The contributions of the paper are as follows. First, an innovative use of blogs in class is characterized and demonstrated. Second, with our interdisciplinary approach, we contribute both to the methods of network analysis and to the theory of computer mediated education, and social learning in particular. We complement the educational use of blogs with the methodology of social network analysis to learn new insights about the role of the networks in collaborative learning communities, thereby benefiting both network theory and justifying learning effects in the community of practice.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. We describe the methodology in the following section. Then we introduce the platform that has been used. Evaluation and survey results are given followed by the discussions of the experiences and observations. In the last section, conclusion remarks are provided.
2. Methodology
As a solution to the teaching challenge that the author has been wrestling with for years, blogs have been used in a novel fashion for four consecutive semesters at two hands-on computer lab classes, namely Java Programming and Programming for Internet Applications, respectively. Our approach sees blogs from a more responsive point of view, and has them serve as catalysts for in-classroom student-instructor interactions.
First of all, the instructor creates a blog for the lab class at the outset (Figure 1). Every student of the class is required to create a blog for the lab when the semester begins. Instructor blogs are for posting lab materials in the curriculum, categorizing descriptions of resources and making announcements to the class. In other words, they serve to deliver lab sheets and hand-outs in electronic version. Students are encouraged to read the instructor blog before class meets so that they can get themselves prepared. Unlike situations where students make comments based on literature readings, review course-related materials, or simply do their homework after the class meets, the blog is used in a real-time manner. When finishing a lab in class, students are asked to submit their results at their own blogs immediately and make a notice by placing a link at the instructor’s blog where the lab is made public. Pursuing the links at the “drop box” and checking out students’ blogs, the instructor can grasp immediate understanding of student progress such as how many have finished labs, how good the quality of the results is and what problems may have occurred. The blog is so responsive that instructors can make quick and informed judgments on which students to walk to and initiate further interactions with. Through blogs, this can be done without students leaving their seats or even raising their hands, reducing interferences to others who may be still busy working on the lab. Reading the student blogs, the instructors have themselves better prepared before interacting with the students.
Figure 1. Instructor blogs are for posting lab materials in the curriculum.
We closely examine the important features of blogs in the classroom use. We do so from the perspectives of giving students incentives to get heard, increasing their sense of participation, and building stronger and responsive relationships.
Figure 2. Each student posts lab results on her or his blog instead of the instructor blog.
Student-Centric
Traditional LMS (Learning Management System) is class-centric in the sense that students contribute their materials to the class website. Therefore, while the instructor can publish and archive the teaching materials on the LMS, the students find it rather difficult to archive their materials on an individual basis. The problem is that once the class ends, the students cannot access the materials they contributed to the class earlier on. The blogging approach works in an individual way: not only instructors but also students own blogs. The ownership holds no matter whether the class ends or not. The sense of ownership helps build incentives for students to contribute to and participate in the class while taking the course (Figure 2).
Dialogue-Based
we started to take on blogs partly because the existing platform functions in a one-way “publishing” mindset rather than a two-way “engaging” one. Getting student feedback in a lab setting helps engage with students and creates a real dialogue.
Figure 3. The online “drop box” where students place links to trackback to their own blogs.
Status Tracking
Blogs are a versatile administrative tool to track the status of the computer-based lab students conduct. Blog posts replace the paper sheets for students to turn in their lab works. So the instructor knows in real time that finished what and when. This makes it easier for the student to get noticed, supported, and heard (Figure3).
Checking more than a small group of blogs for updates on a real time basis can be a time-consuming process, if not impossible, let alone tracking all of the student blogs in a class. To avoid having to conduct an exhaustive search blog by blog to find what the latest post is, a feed can be used to subscribe to information so that it comes to the blog reader, rather than the reverse. The most popular way to do feed on the blogs is Real Simple Syndication (RSS) [8]. A feed is actually not intended for human reading, but is used for interpretation by software tools, most commonly referred to as feed readers or aggregators. Aggregators allow a user to subscribe to a feed. Thus, the user is automatically informed when a particular blog has been updated and something new has been posted. All is done without the use of E-mail, saving the trouble of dealing with a mass of messages that can overwhelm one’s inbox.
Figure 4. The formation of social learning circles by creating not just trackback links but also dialogue links in blogs.
Social learning
the intrinsic structure of blogs enables social learning. We have asked students to check into their classmates’ blogs to see what other people have written. In the traditional grading, it is the job of the instructor to read students' works; students are not empowered to take aloof of how the works are done by their classmates. In this sense, blogs have the potentials to upgrade personal learning to social learning. For the purpose of promoting critical and analytical thinking, after a student has read another’s posting, she is asked to leave comment to that posting. We call it the creation of” dialogue links” that are different from the trackback links (Figure 4). By doing so, the instructor has a way to know if the student has done his homework to read others’ postings. To avoid overwhelming the students in a large class with a work to make comments on all the postings except her own, usually only a couple of comments are actually asked, although the students are encouraged to read everyone’s work if possible. To create deeper dialogues and further the opportunities of social learning, the students who receive comments from his classmates are asked to do two things next. For one thing, they are asked to say thanks, by leaving a comment below the received ones, to the people who have made the comments to their works. For the other, further comments about the subjects commented by their peers are asked in response. The “comments on comments” may even sometimes create a long sequence of dialogues in terms of discussions or debates involved by more and more people as the dialogues proceed (Figure 5). Fortunately, these dialogues can be tracked by RSS easily, thanks to the feature that many blog platforms added recently to make possible the tracking of comments in addition to the postings.
Figure 5. Students learn from peers by creating dialogues or “comments on comments” with each other.
3. Platform
The in-classroom blog is based on the platform of Blogger at http://www.blogger.com/ which is now property of Google. Although it is a commercial operation, there are no mandatory advertisements that may pop up. This quite atmosphere is one of the reasons it is selected as we certainly do not like to see students get distracted in the middle of a lab simply because of eye-catching advertising media. The search engine along with Blogger is Google, which most students already feel familiar to use. In addition, Blogger provides a set of ready-to-use templates to choose from, and allows users to make a change later on. This personalization function increases sense of ownership. Because vandalism made to blogs arises time and again, a built-in challenge mechanism to fight with crawler-based vandal programs is adopted to filter unwanted posts and comments.
4. Evaluations by Survey
this was a descriptive study of an exploratory nature. Creswell [9] suggests that exploratory studies are most advantageous when “not much has been written about the topic or the population being studied.” Many people have used blogs, but blogs are new to the classroom. In other words, blogs have been seldom applied in-class, although they are good tools as digital journal while the class is not in session. In the fall semester of 2006, students of two undergraduate classes, namely Java Programming Language and Programming for Internet Applications, were used as subjects to solicit feedback to the use of blog. The former class has 38 students enrolled while the latter has 35. A control group study uses a control group to compare to an experimental group in a test of a causal hypothesis. As a control group, a third class of23 students sitting in graduate-level lectures on electronic commerce, is also selected for comparison. The latter uses blogs simply as a means of digital journal and homework drop-box; no in-class attention is made through the blogs unlike the former two laboratory classes. The questionnaire was poised by a score on a 5-point scale, where 5 (Strongly Agree) represents the maximum score of the scale and 1(Strongly Disagree) represents the minimum score. All the questionnaires are administrated anonymously by a third party without the instructor on the spot.
48% respondents agree that the blog helps interactions among students enrolled in the same class while 18 %don’t agree and 34% have no opinions. 79%respondents agree that the use of in-class blogs helps keep the students interested and motivated in learning, while the remaining 21% have no opinions. As to the impact of in-class blogging on learning effectiveness, 86% respondents think it is positive while 1% thinks it is negative and 13% have no opinions.
When asked whether you will read classmates’ blogs when a take-home assignment problem is hard, 84%respondents answer positively while 3% answer no and the remaining 13% have no opinions. We found that most students will try to get some ideas from classmates when there are no sufficient clues to a problem. The concern of duplicating was first serious. However, when asked whether you uphold the principles of respecting intellectual property and refuse to duplicate, 79% responds positively while 6% confess they do duplicate at least some of others’ ideas that are posted on their classmates’ blogs and the remaining15% have no opinions. The detailed study can be founding [16].
5. Assessing Social Connectedness In order to measure the connectedness of social interactions in the learning groups, a study was conducted by inviting students to make comments on the peers’ works. First of all, a short essay was written by each student who took a tour to a local science fair. The class was size of 36 from sophomore to senior undergraduates. After the essay was finished online in the classroom, each student was asked to browse their peers’ works and make at least 3 comments on others’ essays (Figure 6). Then a social network analysis [11-14, 17] was conducted to investigate the student behaviors in terms of social learning. Three questions were formulated at the outset.
Figure 6: The use of social network analysis for blog based e-Learning activities.
[Q1]
How many student works will be read and commented?
[Q2]
Are there opinion leaders in the learning group understudy? If there are, how many?
[Q3]
What is the probability of reaching peers’ works by no more than N clicks through dialogue links on the works? (N is the number of students.)
We investigated the blogs of N=36 participating students and chased the links of comments one by one. Table 1 summarizes the statistics of the comments found in the study. A distribution of comments is shown in Figure 7.
Table 1: Metrics of Social Learning
Items
Numbers
Total of Participants
36
Number of Comments
127
Average Comments per Participant (C/P)
3.5
Standard Deviation of C/P
2.6
Number of Participants Receiving No Comments at all
6
Number of Participants Receiving at least One Comment
30
Percentage of Participants Receiving Comments
83%
Number of Participants Receiving Triple of C/P
1
Number of Participants Receiving Double but less than Triple of C/P
3
Figure 7: Distribution of numbers of comments versus counts.
Regarding Q1, 83% of the students received at least one comment on their works, with only 6 students receiving nothing at all (Table 1). We took a deeper investigation into the blogs of the 6 students. Two of them were found with no attractive content in their essays. The other four of them were found to be late turning in their essays. In the latter case, it is hardly possible to receive any comment because most of the students were done with making comments. Therefore, we have high confidence that most of the students receive comments especially if they can have their works uploaded on time.
Regarding Q2, there were four students who received at least seven comments which were double of the average number of comments (Figure 7). Among the four students, one student even received triple of the average. So there existed a few opinion leaders in the learning group. Those leaders created opportunities for their peers to be exposed to high quality works which served as live model examples.
In order to answer Q3, we calculated the transitive closure of the Boolean adjacency matrix A which has element aij =1 if Participant i left a comment on Participant j, and aij =0 otherwise. The transitive closure A* of A is a measurement of connectedness of the group, which can be computed by the following formula:
A*= ∪ Ai
i=1..N
The more non-zero entries in A*, the higher degree the connectedness is. In our case, there are 36*36=1296 elements in the matrix A. We collected aij by chasing the dialogue links in every student’s blog. Then the matrix A was coded and its transitive closure computed in Matlab.
Figure 8: Distribution of numbers of hops versus counts.
We applied Floyd-War shall algorithm [15] to calculate the transitive closure and the distance between ordered pairs of participants in terms of hops where the hop count cij is the number of clicks required to traverse from Participant i to Participant j. The transitive closure A* in our case was found to contain only 443unreachable ordered pairs out of the total 1296. Note cijis seldom equal to cji in our observations. The distribution of numbers of hops is shown in Figure 8.There are 117 direct links from Participant i to Participant j for some i, j, which means Participant i to Participant j is just one click away. There are 201ordered pairs of participants who are just 2 clicks away. The peak appears when the number of hops is 3 and there are 223 such ordered pairs. The number of ordered pairs decreases to 195, 67, and 14, respectively when the hop count is 4, 5, and 6. No pairs can be found if the number of hops is greater than 6. Therefore, the study shows that either two participants are just a few clicks away (all below 7, and 2.8 on average in our case), or they are not connected at all. By making only3.5 connections per person in average, with probability65.8% the 36 participants can chase the dialogue links and read their peers’ works along in just a few chained links. This strongly supports social connectedness in the learning group.
6. Discussions In terms of social learning, there is a difference between blogs and discussion forums (namely BBSs).While similar in some aspects, there remain substantial differences in user experiences. According to [10], discussion forums are predominately shared group spaces in which individual voices get heard but are not afforded specific space of their own. Therefore, discussions belong to different people or subjects are interwoven frequently, making it difficult to focus on subjects of interests or join the discussions. On the contrary, blogs provide a platform for individual expression and also support reader commentary, critique, and inter-linkage as subsequent steps. Blogs make more sense especially in cases where there is no strong sense of group belonging or royalty, as in the case we are discussing.
Using blogs is found to simplify the tasks of reducing piracy. While we encourage students to exchange ideas and make discussions, pirating end results from others is strictly prohibited. The tactics to prevent students from pirating in our practice is by time stamping the lab works and making them public on the web as somas possible. The idea is similar to protecting a patent by making it well known to the world. Blogs by design serve such a purpose. Anyone that pirates risks being caught by the instructor as well as virtually every other student in the class.
We have success with seeing students learning from peers through blogs. Traditionally, students turn in their works to instructors and have no easy way to learn how their peers achieve on the same assignments. By browsing the comments made by instructors on students’ blogs and the selected peer works, students have better chances to stimulate new ideas to be different from each other. In addition to teacher’s comments to students, we encourage students to read peers blogs and leave comments there. We find students learn further from peers by creating dialogues with each other. Students find themselves more critically analytical in their thinking when they reengaged in such dialogues.
The study shows students who took the lab courses are satisfied with turning in lab results through blog posting, getting instructor's walk-by interactions, piracy reduction, and learning from peers. Students want to be heard, especially when things they feel aren’t right. The option to keep anonymity if they want makes students feel easier to leave complaints at the instructor blog. Therefore, occasional complaints are not unusual with blogs. Willingness to deal with complaints is essential in the blogging mindset.
Students are given the opportunities to archive the process in the class participation. With blogs that belong to themselves rather than the instructor or the class, students can look back in time about what they learned and how they made it. The blogs remain even after students graduate from schools. With blogs, vivid archives of learning activities and accomplishments can be kept for future retrospect and review. Perhaps sometime in the future, student blogs become essential part of transcripts and certificate of degrees.
7. Conclusions and Future Works
In this study, student feedback is collected and behavior patterns analyzed based on social network theory. Students are satisfied to be able to archive the process in the class participation. Using blogs is found to simplify the tasks of reducing piracy. For the purpose of knowledge sharing, blogs are a viable platform for ideas to float and grow. From the implementation point of view, blogs are easy to maintain, low cost, easy to deploy, and simple to get started. It does not have to be perfect in the beginning, and in fact it is unlikely it is satisfactory the first time. Having student feedback in the process makes us able to address various concerns and make progress.
It is important to analyze the students’ contributions from the perspective of content. Content analysis is based on the tenet that the content of communication contains information about the background and the effect of communications. Future works include qualitative analysis of student comments regarding the characteristics of their comments: whether a message containing academic content or non-academic content such as that related to course administration and social conversations. It is also interesting in the area of education to tell the comments which ask a question of academic nature from those that contain a response to a question of academic nature. Lastly, we are interested in applying the network analysis method to learning communities in different areas, potentially on much larger scales.
8. Acknowledgements the work presented in this paper have been funded in part by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under grant numbers NSC 95-2627-E-008-002-.
9. References
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