George Veletsianos, PhD

A great opportunity from today’s email inbox:

AECT’s Research and Theory Division is proud to announce the call for participants for the 2012 Early Career Symposium sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The AECT/NSF Early Career Symposium has been held at the annual AECT International Convention over the last few years, and for 2012 has merged with the AECT Faculty/Mentor Program! The symposium will be held all day Tuesday, October 30th and Wednesday morning, October 31st during the annual AECT International Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. The symposium will engage participants in a day and a half of focused career mentoring and networking.

The symposium will reimburse each participant with the following:
$200 for transportation
2 nights at the conference hotel (at conference rates)
Conference registration fee ($195 for graduate students, $400 for faculty)

We are looking for Nine Early Career Faculty and Nine Advanced Graduate Students to participate! To apply, please go to http://bit.ly/Q8tdAS . Due to the late notification of funding, we are on a tight timeline for application and application review. All application materials must be submitted no later than 12pm Eastern time, September 15th, 2012.

What is open scholarship?

By George Veletsianos

On September 5, 2012

In sharing

What is open scholarship? We discuss it, allude to it, but what are its components?

Royce Kimmons and I were working on a revision to a paper that we hope to be able to share soon and the following comment from a reviewer led us down the path of reflecting upon the concept. The comment was:

One challenge the authors face is defining the “open scholarship” movement when there is so little consensus about what that is. I think many readers will object to the very broad term “Digital Presence through Blogs, Microblogs, Personal Websites, and Social Networking Sites” as being considered “open.” I might consider focusing more on the open publishing and OER and less on social media which may or may not be open.

The reviewer was right in that social media may or may not be open, especially when contrasted to open access and OER, and considering that social media can often be viewed as walled gardens. However, we also think that the use of social media is reflective of current scholarly practice and that open practices are enacted through them. This led us down the path of describing open scholarship as composed of three components. Our revised description was as follows:

We view open scholarship as a collection of emergent scholarly practices that espouse openness and sharing. Boyer’s (1990) framework of scholarship is often used as a starting point for defining scholarly practices in the digital age and a number of authors have sought to update Boyer’s model to reflect contemporary thinking relating to scholarly practice (e.g., Garnet & Ecclesfield, 2011; Heap & Minocha, 2012; Pearce et., al, 2010; Weller, 2011). Nonetheless, there appears to be little consensus in the field about what exactly constitutes open scholarship. Here we take an inclusive approach to open scholarship and consider it to include three components: (1) Open Access and Open Publishing, (2) Open Education, including Open Educational Resources and Open Teaching, and (3) Networked Participation. In our previous work, we have discussed networked participatory scholarship, which is the third component of open scholarship and refers to scholars’ uses of online social networks to share, critique, improve, validate, and enhance their scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012). We are taking an inclusive approach to open scholarship because we believe that this is reflective of current scholarly practice. All three components noted above are instances of open scholarship, but they are enacted or made visible in different forms. Within our frame of understanding, open scholarship is a set of phenomena and practices surrounding scholars’ uses of digital and networked technologies underpinned by certain grounding assumptions regarding openness and democratization of knowledge creation and dissemination.

What do you think? We’d love to hear your insights.

Syllabus for my course: Technology, Education, and Learning Institutions in 2025

By George Veletsianos

On August 29, 2012

In courses, open, scholarship, sharing

I have finished compiling my syllabus for an undergraduate seminar I am teaching, and I thought I would share it. This is a syllabus for a course in which we investigate major trends influencing education, and understand how education and learning institutions are (and are not) changing with the emergence of technologies, social behaviors, and cultural expectations. The syllabus is embedded below, but you can also download it from Scribd though this link

Back in my day, the future of education was…

By George Veletsianos

On August 9, 2012

In courses, sharing

We are about three weeks away from the beginning of the semester. One of the courses I am teaching is a seminar for incoming students and is entitled Technology, Education, and Learning Institutions in 2025. I’m quite excited about the course. Yet, to look at the future, one has to examine the past and investigate not just what transpired, but also what was anticipated to happen. Technological determinism and hype about the future of education is not a 2012 phenomenon: As Mishra, Koehler, & Kereluik (2009) note, statements regarding technological revolutions can be traced back to 1933. As a way to spark a conversation about past technologies and expectations with my students, I created the image above using quickmeme.com. The power of Internet memes has been quite interesting to me, and humor is a great way to encourage reflection and critical thought.

If you were to add your own caption to a meme to make a point about the future of education, or educational technology in general, what would that look like? I’d love to see your thoughts.

SEO strategies for academics. Or, when others search for you, what do they find?

By George Veletsianos

On August 8, 2012

In NPS, scholarship, sharing

In their paper “Intentional Web Presence: 10 SEO Strategies Every Academic Needs to Know” Patrick Lowenthal and Joanna Dunlap offer excellent advice to academics mindful of their web presence and cognizant of the potential impact that the Internet may have on their scholarship. I’ve come to use most of these strategies over the years, but I am excited to see these collected at one location.

I’ll add an 11th strategy: Use an RSS aggregator to (e.g., Google Reader) to gather resources of interest effortlessly and consistently. For example, I receive alerts of the latest journal issues at my aggregator (you can also have these emailed to you). I also follow a number of colleagues’ blogs through there, so I don’t have to visit individual sites. My RSS aggregator also serves as an archiving mechanism.

As academics and scholars engage in the emerging practice of using “participatory technologies and online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and further their scholarship” (which is an argument that we made in this paper), these strategies are important to keep in mind.

What other strategies do you use?

A summary of the Adventure Learning approach to education

By George Veletsianos

On July 31, 2012

In adventure learning, scholarship

Readers of this blog may be interested in a short encyclopedia entry, summarizing the adventure learning approach to education that colleagues and I are using in a few of our projects (e.g., YoTeach and AL Water expeditions). The paper also summarizes productive avenues for future research:

Veletsianos, G. (2012). Adventure Learning. In Seel, N. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (pp. 157-160). Springer Academic.

What education research and instructional design practice can offer to Coursera MOOCs

By George Veletsianos

On July 30, 2012

In courses, engagement, moocs, my research, NPS, online learning, open, scholarship

This is part of my ongoing reflection on moocs. See the rest of the entries here.

I have signed up to a number of MOOCs as a student (and led one of the #change11 weeks), and have spoken in general terms a couple of weeks ago about how education research can help improve the type of education offered through a MOOC. In this post, I will give specific suggestions, focusing on the University of Pennsylvania MOOC: Listening to World Music, offered through Coursera. I am signed up to this course, which started on June 23, and I just submitted the first assignment. I decided to post these thoughts early because of two reasons. First, the beginning of any course is an important moment in its success and I find that it takes a lot of planning and reflection. Second, MOOCS are discussed as being experiments in online education. The Atlantic even calls them “The single most important experiment in higher education.” I agree that they are experimental initiatives, and as such would benefit from ongoing evaluation and advice. Where I disagree with is the notion that they are a departure from what we know about online (and face-to-face) education. This post is intended to highlight just a couple of items that the Coursera instructional designers and learning technologists could have planned for in order to develop a more positive learning experience.

1. Length of the video lectures.

The syllabus lists the length of the video lectures (e.g., video 1 is 10:01 minutes long and video 2 is 10:45 minutes long.) However, this length is not provided on the page that students visit to watch the videos, which is where they need that information. I’ve annotated this below.

2. Opportunities for interaction.

The platform provides forums for students to interact with each other. Learners are of course instrumental and will figure out alternative, and more efficient and effective ways to communicate with each other, if they need to. For instance, in a number of other MOOCs students set up facebook groups, and I anticipate that this will happen here as well. What Coursera could do to support learners in working with each other is to integrate social media plugins within each course. I am surprised that this isn’t prominent within the course because you can see from the images below that Coursera uses social media plugins to allow students to announce participation in the course:

For instance, it appears that the course uses the #worldmusic hashtag, though it’s not integrated within the main page of the course, not does it seem to be a unique hashtag associated with the course.

3. How do you encourage students to watch the videos?

Let’s say that we added the length of each video next to its title. Now, the learner knows that they need about an hour to watch the video. Some learners (e.g., those who are intrinsically motivated by the topic) will watch them without much scaffolding. But, how do you provide encouragement for others to do so? Here’s where some social psychology insights might be helpful. By providing learners with simple descriptions of how the majority of their colleagues are behaving (i.e. appealing to social norms), then one might be able to encourage individuals to watch the videos. For example, the videos might include a dynamic subtitle that informs learners that “8 out of 10 of your peers have watched this video” or that “70% of your peers have completed the first assignment” and so on. This is the same strategy that hotels use to encourage users to reuse towels and the same strategy that Nike uses when it compares your running patterns to the running patterns of other runners, as shown in the image below:

4. Peer-grading expectations.

This course is different from others that I’ve participated in because it includes an element of peer-grading. This is exciting to me because I’m a firm believer in social learning. One minor concern however is the following: I don’t know how many peers I am supposed to evaluate. I thought I was supposed to evaluate just one, but each time I finish my evaluation, I am presented with the option to “evaluate next student.” Do I keep evaluating? How many do I need to evaluate before I can move to the next step? I don’t know. In other words, it’s always helpful to inform the learner of what s/he has to do. For instance, in my case, I just stopped evaluating peers after having evaluated 4 because I don’t know how much I am expected to do. Perhaps there’s no minimum… and this information would be helpful to me as a learner.

Overall, my experience with this course is positive, though there is a lot of room for improvement here, which is to be expected. For example, I haven’t touched much on the pedagogy of the course, but there’s a few more weeks left… so stay tuned!

Notes:

Nike photo credit. Thanks to my colleague Chuck Hodges for directing my attention to the Nike example.