George Veletsianos, PhD

Category: my research Page 7 of 20

Being online: Recommendations for early-career academics

By

On May 15, 2017

In Ideas, my research, online learning, open, papers, scholarship, sharing

When I wrote my book Networked Scholars, I was very intentional in my writing. I wanted to avoid writing a “how to” book. Not that there’s anything wrong with “how to use social media” books, but there’s plenty of those, not to mention countless blog posts and advice columns on outlets like Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle, etc.

Beyond that though, my interests aren’t social media per se. My interests are on the ways that people learn online and the ways that knowledge is managed, negotiated, developed, and shared in digital environments. Though social media are central to these process these days – and let’s face it, most media are social nowadays – there are practices central to knowledge exchange and dissemination that have nothing to do with the technology, such as open access publishing and self-archiving.

What does this have to do with networked scholars? Well, I think the time is ripe to actually write a book of suggestions, principles if you will, for early-career academics (PhD students, new assistant professors). The suggestions will go beyond social media, aiming to (a) help people be more effective and productive online, and (b) help faculty and faculty trainers prepare people in these efforts.

This book will be different. It will be laconic and will nudge individuals to be more awesome in their online practices. I’m partnering with a graphic artist to create it. Below is a page from our early work.

Do you know of a publisher who might be interested? Are you a publisher that is interested? I am exploring Punctum Books, but would love to hear other suggestions.

Liberate your research

Educational Technology as a Sociocultural and Ideological Phenomenon

By

On April 10, 2017

In emerging technologies, my research, papers, scholarship

Rolin Moe and I just published an article in Educause Review that examines the rise of educational technology as a phenomenon within the context of broader political, economic, ideological, and technological issues of concern to the future of higher education. This paper continues the call for thinking critically about the impacts, aims, and uses of technology in education, in our educational institutions, and in students’ and academics’ lives.

The paper posits that the rise of educational technology represents (a) a response to the increasing price of higher education, (b) a shift in political thought from government to free-market oversight of education, (c) a view of education as a product to be packaged, automated, and delivered, and (d) a technocentric belief that technology is a solution to the problems of higher education.

This investigation questions both the potential outcomes and ideological aims of technodeterministic thinking and argues that educational technology may ultimately exacerbate rather than mitigate the very problems it purports to solve.

Digital Learning and Social Media Research Funding: 2017

By

On March 9, 2017

In my research, online learning, papers, Royal Roads University

Digital Learning and Social Media Research Funding for 2017

Description of Opportunity

The Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Technology at Royal Roads University invites applications from advanced doctoral students (i.e. those who completed their graduate coursework) and post-doctoral associates to conduct research with the Digital Learning and Social Media Research Group.

Funding for five (5) research opportunities are available.

The Digital Learning and Social Media Research Group (http://www.thedlrgroup.com/) is an international and interdiciplinary team of researchers investigating the ways that social media and other emerging technologies are used in learning, teaching, scholarship, and institutional settings. The group is led by Dr. George Veletsianos (Canada Research Chair & Associate Professor, Royal Roads University) and Dr. Royce Kimmons (Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University). The Digital Learning and Social Media Research Group executes the CRC’s program of research.

Aims

The research funding opportunities aim to involve applicants in the scholarly endeavors of the research group and thus provide experiential mentoring focused on supporting the students’ or post docs’ scholarly and professional development. With a mentor, each student or post doc will co-plan, execute, and submit for publication a research study.

Funding is available for research that focuses on one or more of the following areas: networked scholarship, social media use in education, digital/online learning, open learning, emerging technologies, learning analytics, social network analysis, or educational data mining.

Deadlines

Potential researchers should submit their application materials by April 15, 2017.

Start date is around May 15th

Deliverables

Submission of a co-authored research study to a peer-reviewed journal.

Duration

Research opportunities are expected to last anywhere from 3 to 5 months

Requirements

  • Advanced doctoral student status (usually in the 3rd or 4th year of their studies) OR post doctoral status having completed a graduate degree (PhD/EdD) within the last 3 years.
  • Enrolment in or having attained a graduate degree (PhD/EdD) in education, educational technology, learning technologies, learning sciences, curriculum and instruction, cognitive science, or other related field.
  • Individuals must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada, or must hold a valid employment visa or work permit issued by the Government of Canada.

To be well-suited for this opportunity, individuals must have excellent organizational abilities, analytic skills, and be familiar with methodologies involving the analysis of quantitative or qualitative data.

Questions?

Questions regarding this opportunity can be send to CRCILT.Research@RoyalRoads.ca

Application Process

Interested applicants are invited to submit the following materials to CRCILT.Research@RoyalRoads.ca  April 15, 2017:

  • Curriculum Vitae (CV)
  • A single-authored paper (single-authored class papers are acceptable)
  • An expression of interest or research proposal (not to exceed 2 single-spaced pages) that includes the following:
    • Description of a research project that the applicant wishes to complete under the auspices of the research group (This description should include at least 2-3 research questions of interest and a proposed methodology)
    • Description of experiences analyzing quantitative or qualitative data

Applications will be evaluated by an academic panel.

Though the research group is interested in any proposal examining digital learning and social media use in higher education, we are especially interested in proposals focusing on analyzing large-scale datasets such as those gathered from public sources (e.g., Twitter, university websites, and YouTube). The research group has expertise in this area and can collect, structure, and organize data necessary for such endeavors. Thus, we welcome applications from those with and without technical expertise. Past studies conducted in this context include the following:

 

Research question Data sources
How do students and professors use Twitter? ~600K tweets from ~400 Twitter profiles
What narratives do institutional Twitter acccounts construct for students and faculty? Images posted by public Canadian Universities on Twitter
How well do institutional websites meet mandated accessibility requirements? ~3,000 U.S. university homepages
What does informal learning look like on YouTube? ~1.4 million YouTube comments

For examples of research studies in this area conducted by the research group, please refer to:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751616300033

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjet.12428/abstract

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12101/abstract

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12528-017-9131-7

 

The individuals receiving funding in 2016 have:

  • Used historical twitter data to study the discourse surrounding openness over time
  • Examined the ways that instructional design & technology programs use Twitter
  • Investigated whether empathy, civility, and thoughtfulness are present in the comments posted in a YouTube community

Compensation

$2,000 CAD upon submission of the study.

A large-scale study of Twitter Use in MOOCs

By

On February 1, 2017

In moocs, my research, online learning, open, papers

Researchers have proposed that social media might offer many benefits to Massive Open Online Courses. Yet such claims are supported by little empirical evidence. The existing research exploring the use of social media in MOOCs has been conducted with individual courses and convenience samples, making it difficult to know to what extent research results are generalizable. In this mixed methods research, I used data mining techniques to retrieve a large-scale Twitter data set from 116 MOOCs with course-dedicated hashtags. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, I then examined users’ participation patterns, the types of users posting to those hashtags, the types of tweets that were posted, and the variation in types of posted tweets across users. I found little evidence to support the claims that Twitter as an adjunct to MOOCs is used much/effectively. Results show that learners make up only about 45% of users and contribute only about 35% of tweets. The majority of users contribute minimally, and an active minority of users contributes the preponderance of messages.

Brand new tennis ball with bright fluorescent green felt and white rubber band, surrounded by eight other used balls with duller, more washed out colors, deteriorated nap and dirt marks.

Brand new tennis ball among eight used ones – Image by Horia Varlan CC-BY

These findings do not reveal substantive evidence of learners contributing to multiple hashtags, which may suggest that learners did not find Twitter to be a useful space that provided added value or responded to their needs. Ultimately, these results demonstrate the need for greater intentionality in integrating social media into MOOCs.

I am linking to the pdf pre-print of this article below.

Veletsianos, G. (in press). Toward a Generalizable Understanding of Twitter and Social Media Use Across MOOCs: Who Participates on MOOC Hashtags and In What Ways? Journal of Computing in Higher Education.

 

BCcampus Open Education Advocacy & Research Fellowships

By

On January 31, 2017

In my research, open

It’s February, already?! This year, I’m excited to spend some time collaborating with a group of open education colleagues, as part of a BCcampus Open Education Advocacy and Research Fellowship. The rest of the team consists of Jennifer Barker, Ken Jeffery, and Rajiv Jhangiani. Good company!

bccampusFellows

Group selfie, by Rajiv Jhangiani (CC-BY)

The aims of the fellowship are to raise awareness of open educational practices and to conduct, present, and publish research on open educational practices at BC institutions. You can read more about what each of us is hoping to achieve in this announcement.

And since this fellowship is related to advocacy, please take 4 minutes and 40 seconds to watch the video below which summarizes the empirical evidence on efficacy and perceptions surrounding open textbooks.

Learning Design at Pearson

By

On December 21, 2016

In learner experience, my research, online learning, pedagogical agents, scholarship, sharing

Last week, a reporter from EdSurge reached out to me to shed some light on what Pearson called their Learning Design Principles. The EdSurge article is here, but below is a more detailed rough draft of the points that I made to share. I am posting them here for a fuller picture of some of my thoughts.

  1. Nothing proprietary (yet, perhaps). I saw a number of sources note that Pearson released their proprietary learning design principles. There’s not much proprietary in the principles. All of these ideas are well-documented in the literature pertaining to educational technology found in cognitive psychology, learning sciences, instructional design, and education literature.
  2. It’s good to see that Pearson is using findings from the education literature to guide its design and development. Some of these principles should be standard practice. If you are creating educational technology products without considering concepts like instructional alignment, feedback, and scaffolding, authentic learning, student-centered learning environments, and inquiry-based learning, you are likely creating more educational harm than good. The point is that using research to guide educational technology should be applauded and emulated. More educational technology companies should be using research to inform their designs and product iterations.
  3. BUT, since around 2011, the educational technology industry has promoted the narrative that education has not changed since the dawn of time. With a few exceptions, the industry has ignored the history, theory, and research of the academic fields associated with improving education with technology. The industry has ignored this at its own peril because we have a decent – not perfect, but decent – understanding of how people learn and how we can help improve the ways that people learn. But, the industry has developed products and services starting from scratch, making the same mistakes that other have done in the past, while claiming that their products and services will disrupt education.
  4. Not all of the items released are principles. For example, “pedagogical agents” is on the list but that’s not a principle. Having studied the implementation of pedagogical agents for more than 7 years, it’s clear that what Pearson is attempting to do is figure our how to better design pedagogical agents for learning. Forgive me while I link to some pdfs of my past work here, but, should amagent’s representation match the content area that they are supporting (should a doctor look like a doctor or should she have a blue mohawk?). Table 1 in this paper provides more on principles for designing pedagogical agents (e.g., agents should establish their role so that learners have a clear anticipation of what the agent can and cannot do: Does the agent purport to know everything or is the agent intended to ask questions but provide no answers?)
  5. As you can tell from the above, I firmly believe that industry needs research/researchers in developing, evaluating, and refining innovations.

…

But more importantly, happy, merry, just, and peaceful holidays to everyone!

Video and audio summaries of our research

By

On August 29, 2016

In my research, research shorts, scholarship, sharing

I wrote a guest post for the Chronicle’s Prof Hacker section describing our use of video and audio to summarize our research findings. The post was published today and it is available here, but I am reposting it below as well.

 

6827221641_3828a03f37_z

Street: First pass – CC licensed image

I use an eclectic assortment of learning resources in my courses. Books, peer-reviewed journal articles, op-eds, white papers, websites, documentaries, lecture videos, podcasts. Readings – especially peer-reviewed journal articles – are integral to my teaching, but I am intentional in my desire to go beyond text, to be inclusive and diverse in my selection of learning resources. In my research, and in my attempts to include multimodal learning resources in my teaching, I discovered that we could do a better job at sharing our scholarship.

 

One of the ways that I am using to share my scholarship in different ways is through the creation of short video and audio clips that accompany each one of my published papers. I believe these might be helpful to colleagues, students, and broader audiences. Colleagues might use them as a way to introduce, humanize, and explore a topic. Students might access them at times when listening is preferable to reading. For example, I listen to podcasts on bus rides because reading on the bus makes me feel dizzy. Others might be in the same predicament. Some students in our research noted that they watched video lectures when engaging in other activities – such as cooking – as a way to accommodate their studies in their busy lives. Broader audiences, such as the general public or journalists, might find video and audio clips valuable as well, as these clips contain information that usually resides behind journal paywalls.

We have created a dedicated YouTube channel to host these videos. Here is a playlist of some of them:

 

The audio is hosted on my personal SoundCloud channel. Here’s a playlist:

We follow a simple process to create these. For each published paper, I collaborate with members of my research group to (a) write a script, (b) record an mp3 file, and (c) produce an animated movie. These media are produced by two individuals using off-the-shelf software. One person writes the script and shares it with the other using a shared Dropbox folder. When I narrate the script, I use Audacity to create the audio file. When my colleague Laura Pasquini narrates, she uses GarageBand. We use instrumental music shared under Creative Commons licenses as background. Once the audio file is created, I post it in on my SoundCloud channel and users can stream it or download it from there. Next, we use VideoScribe to create the animation and since the software is cloud-based, we can both review the draft version of the video prior to publication. The final video is then posted on a YouTube account dedicated to these videos.

 

My research team and I are enjoying exploring the many ways available at our disposal to share our scholarship. We know that creating a video trailer or writing a blog post about a publication isn’t a substitute for high-quality scholarship, but we are enthused at the opportunity to use new technologies to mobilize our research. What are some other ways that you have discovered to share your research with colleagues, students, and the broader public?

 

Page 7 of 20

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén