
Backblog—Online Education and MBAs
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Teachers’ Presence January 10, 2010 By Glen Farrelly Categories: General Online Education and MBAs Having studied at an online university for the past couple years and now in a class where e-learning is a main theme, I'm becoming increasingly familiar with the challenges of engendering successful learning via online mechanisms. e-Learning can take many forms, but it seems to often rely heavily on peer and teacher interaction via discussion boards/forums. I think this experience shows me that strong classroom management, teacher scaffolding, and respect, either online or off, is vital. As Brett says, “A community that provides a sense of safety and in which one feels a legitimate contributor may provide a supportive learning context. However, the degree to which community involvement pushes people towards conformity or stifles discussion because of a subtle press towards adopting community norms needs to be considered” (p.6). I agree that the challenges of projecting, revealing, or protecting identity apply to learning offline and online. Personally, I have found participating in e-Learning discussions allowed me a more safe way to project my thoughts and myself than offline. The more deliberate and controlled online mechanisms allow me to take the time to compose and edit my thoughts and expressions, compared to in-class where I tend to just blurt things out. I believe a failure to project individual identity in e-learning media results in lower social presence, which Shea & Bidjerano found to result in lower "cognitive presence" (critical thinking). Shea and Bidjerano were not clear on how cognitive presence is seen or projected. But it does seem that a lack of visible critical thinking will encourage more of the same. So if my lack of social presence in this article resulted in you learning nothing from this article, than it seems I am clearly to blame. References Brett, C. (n.d.). Educational Perspectives on digital communications technologies. Shea, P., & Bidjerano, T. (2009). Community of inquiry as a theoretical framework to foster "epistemic engagement" and "cognitive presence" in online education. Computers and Education, 52(3), 543-553. Webslinger Glen Farrelly 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Teachers’ Presence November 18, 2009 By Glen Farrelly Categories: General Online Education and MBAs Having studied at an online university for the past couple years and now in a class where e-learning is a main theme, I'm becoming increasingly familiar with the challenges of engendering successful learning via online mechanisms. e-Learning can take many forms, but it seems to often rely heavily on peer and teacher interaction via discussion boards/forums. I think this experience shows me that strong classroom management, teacher scaffolding, and respect, either online or off, is vital. As Brett says, “A community that provides a sense of safety and in which one feels a legitimate contributor may provide a supportive learning context. However, the degree to which community involvement pushes people towards conformity or stifles discussion because of a subtle press towards adopting community norms needs to be considered” (p.6). I agree that the challenges of projecting, revealing, or protecting identity apply to learning offline and online. Personally, I have found participating in e-Learning discussions allowed me a more safe way to project my thoughts and myself than offline. The more deliberate and controlled online mechanisms allow me to take the time to compose and edit my thoughts and expressions, compared to in-class where I tend to just blurt things out. I believe a failure to project individual identity in e-learning media results in lower social presence, which Shea & Bidjerano found to result in lower "cognitive presence" (critical thinking). Shea and Bidjerano were not clear on how cognitive presence is seen or projected. But it does seem that a lack of visible critical thinking will encourage more of the same. So if my lack of social presence in this article resulted in you learning nothing from this article, than it seems I am clearly to blame. References Brett, C. (n.d.). Educational Perspectives on digital communications technologies. Shea, P., & Bidjerano, T. (2009). Community of inquiry as a theoretical framework to foster "epistemic engagement" and "cognitive presence" in online education. Computers and Education, 52(3), 543-553. Glen Farrelly Webslinger 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Discussing Online Accessibility on International Day of the Disabled Person December 3, 2008 By Glen Farrelly Categories: General Online Education and MBAs Software Companies Web 2.0 Today is the international Day of the Disabled Person, so it’s fitting that the United Nations and Internet professionals and experts worldwide have gathered at the Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad to address the issue of improving website accessibility for the disabled. The session, my first of the conference, was called “Information Accessibility: Equal Access & Equal Opportunity to People with Disabilities”. Overall, there was a lot of focus on the role of standards for website accessibility, but it was rather short on actual plans for its widespread adoption. For those new to the field of website accessibility there was good background information provided on the issue’s history, scope, and its importance. While my personal research has focused on website accessibility for the visually impaired, the issue also covers various disabilities such as hearing, cognitive, and physical. The presentations repeated the key messages that 1) the Internet is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life, e.g. education, government services, business, recreation so disabled people should not be shut out 2) All people should have equal access and equal opportunity to resources online or otherwise 3) Internet can be particularly able to help the disabled more actively participate in society. Representatives from China and India both stated their countries commitment to this issue and it was pointed out that 26 countries have enacted policy or law on the issue of Internet accessibility. The first speaker opened with some sobering statistics: 600 million people around the world have a disability (I suspect that number would be much higher if you count people with low to diminished vision, which is particularly relevant for online readers). 186 million children with disabilities haven’t completed primary school. There are clearly opportunities for an accessible Internet to improve people lives, as the first speaker said “these are not just figures they are real people – and we simply cannot afford to say it’s your problem go fend for yourself”. All the speakers were in agreement that while there has been progress in devising what needs to be done, significant barriers still remain and accessibility is still not widespread. An interesting point made by Cynthia Waddell that the notion of disability is evolving. We need to acknowledge that if there were not societal and physical barriers the concept of disability might not even exist. Bringing disabled people into the mainstream is a way to help end marginalization and in some cases poverty. As more and more of life moves online, the issue of website accessibility becomes important. Both Cynthia and an accessibility expert from the W3C, Shadi Abou-Zahra, pointed out the issue has various spheres that must be addressed. These spheres would be web authoring software, web developers, browsing software, and assistive technology. Web design historically has not included accessible design for persons with disabilities. Web developers tend to not educated sufficiently on this issue. Even web authoring software didn’t help and often hindered. Assistive technology is making strides but it isn’t enough on its own. Browsers are getting more standard compliant, but this has only recently been the case. I must admit that while I completely agree with the speakers that assert that accessibility is a human right for all and that more policy is needed, I don’t believe this issue will resonate or convince businesses and organizations around the world to make their website accessible. So I felt a crucial point was made by Shadi when he listed the auxiliary benefits of accessibility. Shadi pointed out that accessible sites are more compatible with mobile technologies, addresses the needs of our ageing demographics, and can open up new markets. I have found that when I state to business people not only the social benefits of accessibility but also the business benefits this helps give the issue more priority than it would otherwise have. As Shadi pointed out accessibility features can improve experience for all users: “Think of it like an elevator. I need an elevator to access a building, but an elevator benefits everyone”. Overall, the session was a good backgrounder on the issue, but I was disappointed that the focus on standards and policy leaves behind the web developers in the field whom may have heard of this issue but then must struggle with limited (or no) resources or budget to adopt this. So I raised this point to the speakers. My question was (yes there was a long preamble) as one who has worked as a web developer and producer for the past ten years and is now researching Internet accessibility, that while I applaud the efforts at creating accessibility standards, they are not enough. The standards are complicated to follow, there are not specifics of how to do it, and the existing educational material is not much help. For example, it’s easy to say don’t use tables for layout but it is difficult to actually make that happen even when building a website from scratch, let alone retrofitting one. It’s also easy to say beware of colour blindness when designing web navigation, but there are many different types of colour blindness and the tools to help demonstrate the issue are insufficient. Among the web developer community I believe awareness is fairly common – most developers know about the issue and some of the remedies – but using alt text is not enough. As the speakers acknowledge, the authoring tools must do more to support this, but also educational material needs to be more comprehensive and simpler. Training needs to be more widespread – and I would add most crucially it needs to be free too. I was excited to learn that the next generation of W3C material on website accessibility is going to be addressing the implementation challenges. Their website was my primary source for information on this issue, and while it provided a good framework, there needed to be more practical information and feasible plans. The discussion after the session was also interesting. We discussed the need for a central, prominent repository of templates to use for this. I pointed out how I could not find any, let alone “proper” code for how to make an accessible table, when one genuinely needs to use a table, that is for presenting tabular data like statistics. I struggled through the standards and came up with a code snippet that I added to my web team’s code snippets in Dreamweaver and then posted on my blog - but we sure need more widespread and prominent sharing of this type of work. Glen Farrelly Webslinger 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Personalizing Collaborative Work … Individuals and Co-creation October 24, 2008 By Jon Husband Categories: General Online Education and MBAs Social Networking Web 2.0 My friend / colleague Harold Jarche maintains an highly informative blog and website focused on elearning and the design and application of social computing to learning and effective knowledge work. He recently uncovered an interesting graphic that speak to the notion of the individual user operating in an ongoing flow of information, taking in information and and co-creating knowledge while operating in continuous flows of information. It is increasingly apparent that individual cognitive styles and work habits must be considered as a key element in the process of collaboration, and I have commented on this issue in a previous post … I’ll Do It My Way - The Mass Customization of Knowledge Work. I’m unable at the moment to upload the image but will keep working on a way to do so. In the meantime, motor on over to the blog post that sets out the position of the Amplified Individual and take a look at how the individual sits at the center of flows and co-creation.
Jon Husband Wirearchy 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Academic Research Online Is a Walled Garden February 12, 2008 By Glen Farrelly Categories: Online Education and MBAs Web 2.0 I've been consumed for the past three weeks researching and writing papers for my Master’s program. I managed to write one paper an Internet topic (a semiotic analysis of folksonomies) and added as many Net references in the others as I could. In the process of researching online on online topics, I noted two critiques of academia: 1) vehicles for searching online resources are inadequate 2) academic research remains too cloistered The last few weeks were the first time ever for me that I was exposed to the wealth of electronic academic research. I thought there was lots of information on the Web before, but I was stunned by the quantity and quality of academic information available to students (the databases require log-in and an individual subscription is prohibitively expensive). Royal Roads University has one of the largest electronic libraries in Canada, which is fitting as it is primarily an online university. Electronic information there takes the forms of:
I haven’t made the most of e-books, due to my dislike of reading for a long time onscreen and that e-books can’t accompany me to many of my regular reading places. The theses seem promising, although due to Royal Roads being a comparatively young university they don't have a lot of theses available. Online academic resources a treasure, albeit hidden & sans map I did extensively use online academic journals and this is where I was overjoyed and overwhelmed. I had no idea how many journals there were, some of which, believe it or not, aren’t completely esoteric. There are essentially two problems that I discovered with online searching of these journal databases. Problem one is that there is a bewildering array of journal databases. Second, the search engines for pretty much all these services are, well, crappy. Granted, graduate students do require more advanced search skills than a normal online surfer would need, but still the search tools are unnecessarily complicated, buggy at times, and just plain miss things. I found a lot of instances where I was searching the entire body of articles and certain results would not appear, but later, having found these articles via other means, I would find the terms appearing prominently. The journal database search engines were so generally poor that I had to use other means, serendipity being the most painful method for time-pressed procrastinators such as myself. Google Scholar helps save my day Fortunately, someone turned me onto Google Scholar. I found it retrieved items from academic databases better than the databases own search, plus Google Scholar pulls up other applicable information as well. Truly a very handy tool - thank you Google! Ivory towers cloister useful research My final complaint is that while I was also surprised by the quantity and quality of academic research on Internet topics, I was miffed that I never saw any of it before. I’ve worked in the Internet for years, have read books and articles, and been to conferences and was never exposed to this research before. Granted, it is possible that this research could have come to me via other authors and speakers who digested and regurgitated it. Also, it's not like the research is fit for wider application as can be exceedingly and, I might add, unnecessarily obtuse and elitist (another complaint, sorry). But some research is fine for everyone working in the field as is, and in other cases the findings could be repurposed for wider distribution. Frankly, I think that too much of academia is infatuated with itself and doesn’t make enough effort to share their research to the outside world. With this attitude one ends up with research for research’s sake. And those, like me, who can benefit from the information don’t get it. Glen Farrelly Webslinger 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Way to go, B.C. June 19, 2007 By Peter Wolchak Categories: IT Staffing Solutions Online Education and MBAs The cover story in the upcoming July issue of Backbone is about Canada's competitiveness in relation to the rest of the world. Not to steal the issue's thunder, but our competitive numbers could be better and many people say a lack of tech investment is part of the problem. So it's very good news that the B.C. government is tripling the size of the funding for its internship program to $10 million. The money is targeted specifically at boosting competitiveness. “These new funds will allow MITACS (a national research network) to provide more than 650 internships over the next four years, more than tripling the size of the program,” said Advanced Education Minister Murray Coell in a press release. “The internship program will build the province's base of highly-skilled graduates while encouraging innovation and commercialization in B.C.'s knowledge-based economy. It is also leveraging another $5 million from industry partners for the program." If we want Canada to be competitive on a world stage – and as globalization takes firmer hold and as wealth generation is increasingly tied to tech prowess, we do want that – then we need a workforce that is not only able to create innovation but also interested in doing so. When our best and brightest minds scan the career landscape, we need technology options to stand out from the landscape. Internship programs are an excellent way to do that. Peter Wolchak 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email |






