George Veletsianos, PhD

CC licensed photo by Magic Madzik

This summer has gone by faster than I hoped it would! Highlights included:

work and pleasure trips lasting a few days in Lund (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denmark), Frankfurt (Germany), Larnaca (Cyprus),
three days of fun and productivity in Madison, WI for the 26th annual Distance Teaching & Learning conference
the release of Emerging Technologies in Distance Education
my summer course taught online via ELGG (which seems to have been received extremely well)
an interview with Mark Parry at the Chronicle of Higher Education on social and participatory online learning
and writing a paper with Royce Kimmons, one of our PhD students (information on this coming shortly…)

I am however looking forward to the Fall semester (which starts on Wednesday). Our new students have arrived and I am teaching the introduction to instructional design class that they are taking – I’m very excited about that class and look forward to working with brilliant minds to pursue learning innovations! The fall semester promises to be a busy one though as I am presenting at 2 conferences, giving keynotes at 2 other ones, and launching an adventure learning project in the Sociology department…. while working on a couple research papers.

How’s that for a 4-month summary update?! More detailed posts will follow, but, for now, you can’t complain that I haven’t kept you updated :).

Social media & Open Education Critiques

By George Veletsianos

On July 27, 2010

In open, scholarship, sharing, work

Critiquing eyes, by CarbonNYC (CC-license)

Critiques of the current state of education are omnipresent. In such critiques, authors often highlight the positive role that social media and open education can play. While I don’t believe that the status quo is the best environment for education and scholarship to thrive, I also don’t live in a social media utopia. Yet, the critiques of social media and open education that I read are often superficial and easily countered: face-to-face interaction is important and the “best” mode of communication, we can’t allow open participation due to federal regulation such as FERPA, etc, etc. This is frustrating. Critique and self-reflection are healthy, even for mere humans who support both the integration of social media and openness in educational settings (especially higher education). To help me (and my students) better understand the complexities, hidden agendas, implications, and rhetoric vs. reality, surrounding social media and open education, I have been collecting serious and well-articulated critiques of the two. I am posting a few of these below, but if you know of any more, please feel free to add them in the comments and I’ll update this entry!

Open Education: The need for critique (Richard Hall)

The educational significance of social media: A critical perspective (Neil Selwyn)

Citizenship, technology and learning –a review of recent literature (Neil Selwyn)

The romance of the public domain (Chander & Sunder)

What does ‘open’ really mean? (Tony Bates)

Emerging Technologies in Distance Education: Available

By George Veletsianos

On July 23, 2010

In online learning, open, papers, scholarship, work

My edited book, Emerging Technologies in Distance Education, has just been published from Athabasca University Press, Canada’s leading publisher of Open Access, peer-reviewed, scholarly publications! Go get your free copy from the AU site above, and if you want to support the great work that Athabasca University Press is doing, then purchase the paperback volume (disclaimer: I earn a minute stream of royalty fees per copy).

A summary of the book follows:

A one-stop knowledge resource, Emerging Technologies in Distance Education showcases the international work of research scholars and innovative distance education practitioners, who use emerging interactive technologies for teaching and learning at a distance. This widely anticipated book harnesses the dispersed knowledge of international experts who highlight pedagogical, organizational, cultural, social, and economic factors that influence the adoption and integration of emerging technologies in distance education. Emerging Technologies in Distance Education provides expert advice on how educators can launch effective and engaging distance education initiatives, in response to technological advancements, changing mindsets, and economic and organizational pressures. The volume goes beyond the hype surrounding Web 2.0 technologies and highlights the important issues that researchers and educators need to consider to enhance educational practice.

Individual chapters are as follows:

PART 1: Foundations of Emerging Technologies in Distance Education
1. A definition of emerging technologies for education | George Veletsianos
2. Theories for Learning with Emerging Technologies | Terry Anderson
3. Imagining multi-roles in Web 2.0 Distance Education | Elizabeth Wellburn & BJ Eib
4. Beyond distance and time constraints: applying social networking tools and Web 2.0 approaches in distanceeducation | Mark J. W. Lee & Catherine McLoughlin

PART 2: Learning Designs for Emerging Technologies
5. “Emerging”: A re-conceptualization of contemporary technology design and integration | The Learning Technologies Collaborative
6. Developing Personal Learning Networks for Open & Social Learning | Alec Couros
7. Creating a Culture of Community in the Online Classroom Using Artistic Pedagogical Technologies | Beth Perry & Margaret Edwards
8. Structured Dialogue Embedded within Emerging Technologies | Yiannis Laouris, Gayle Underwood, Romina Laouri, Aleco Christakis

PART 3: Social, Organizational, & Contextual Factors in Emerging Technologies Implementations
9. Personal Learning Environments | Trey Martindale & Michael Dowdy
10. Open source course management systems in distance education | Andrew Whitworth & Angela Benson
11. Implementing Wikis in higher education institutions: the case of the Open University of Israel | Hagit Meishar-Tal, Yoav Yair and Edna Tal-Elhasid
12. The Use of Web Analytics in the Design and Evaluation of Distance Education | P. Clint Rogers, Mary R. McEwen & SaraJoy Pond
13. New communication options: A renaissance in IP use | Richard Caladine, Trish Andrews, Belinda Tynan, Robyn Smyth, & Deborah Vale

PART 4: Learner-learner, Learner-Content, & Learner-Instructor Interaction & Communication with Emerging Technologies
14. Using Social Media to Create a Place that Supports Communication | Rita Kop
15. Technical, Pedagogical and Cultural Considerations for Language Learning in MUVEs / Charles Xiaoxue Wang, Brendan Calandra & Youngjoo Yi
16. Animated Pedagogical Agents and Immersive Worlds: Two Worlds Colliding / Bob Heller & Mike Procter

Trying out ELGG

By George Veletsianos

On July 10, 2010

In sharing

I am teaching an online course starting on Monday and I am using the ELGG social networking platform as the tool through which I will run the course. I’ve used ning, pbworks, and wordpress (and yes, even Moodle… and WebCT and Blackboard) to run courses in the past, but I am really excited about using ELGG because I don’t have to hack together various tools to offer a diverse social learning experience for my students. Judging from past experience and other users, the platform is promising and will deliver quite a lot! @roycekimmons and the people at UT’s IDEA Studio deserve a public thank you as well, as they had to tweak the installation and hack various plugins to fit our needs. More experiences with ELGG will be shared in due course!

Conference paper submissions as final papers

By George Veletsianos

On June 1, 2010

In courses, scholarship

One of the new activities that I tried this semester was to ask my MA and PhD students to submit their final papers to a (well-known, well-attended, international) conference. To do this, I aligned the requirements for the final paper to the requirements for the conference submission. The reasons for doing this are plenty: (a) authenticity isn’t just something we should pay lip-service to, (b) we require our students to present at a conference prior to graduating, so this activity allows them to fulfill two requirements at once, (c) this way, students can easily see that their work has implications beyond the confines of our classroom and university. And, while the process of conference submission is more important than the outcome, I can’t help but be content with the outcome shown below:

Congratulations to the students – I am looking forward to taking pictures of you presenting at the conference!

Pedagogical Agent Appearance & Stereotypes

By George Veletsianos

On May 22, 2010

In papers, pedagogical agents

I have a new publication out that deals with the degree to which students stereotype virtual characters (short answer: yes they do and this behavior influences learning processes, but sometimes they resist. Or, they say that they resist. It’s a bit more complex than that, but the results present an interesting thinking exercise). This one has been “in the works” for more than a couple of years, but it’s recently been updated because interest on the topic seems to be growing.

Veletsianos, G. (2010). Contextually relevant pedagogical agents: Visual appearance, stereotypes, and first impressions and their impact on learning. Computers & Education, 55(2), 576-585. [pre-print PDF]

Abstract: Humans draw on their stereotypic beliefs to make assumptions about others. Even though prior research has shown that individuals respond socially to media, there is little evidence with regards to learners stereotyping and categorizing pedagogical agents. This study investigated whether learners stereotype a pedagogical agent as being knowledgeable or not knowledgeable and how this acuity influenced learning. Participants were assigned to four experimental conditions differing by agent (scientist or artist) and tutorial type (nanotechnology or punk rock). Quantitative analyses indicated that agents were stereotyped depending on their image and the academic domain under which they functioned. Regardless of tutorial, participants assigned to the artist agent recalled more information than participants assigned to the scientist agent. Learning differences between the groups varied according to whether agent appearance fit the content area under investigation. Qualitative results indicated learner’s stereotypic expectations as well as their unwillingness to draw conclusions based on visual appearance.

What do new forms of scholarship look like?

By George Veletsianos

On May 21, 2010

In scholarship

A trackback from Jon Becker’s post on curating a review/article on a book has me thinking:

What do new forms of scholarship look like?
What is the role of the “reviewer” in new forms of scholarship?

More specifically, in terms of research questions and the creative idea that Jon had:

Who contributes to “alternative” (or, non-traditional) forms of scholarship? Why do they?
What is the perceived benefit of contributing?

Finally, I am wondering: What is the role of the reader? This question is especially intriguing: While research is usually “consumed” (and infrequently responded to), would readers and authors be more inclined to interact if new forms of scholarship provided more social affordances? Or, are we hitting a cultural wall again?

[Photo by watz is licensed under a Creative Commons license]