Alfonso Bustos

Personal learning environments: design and use / Los entornos personales de aprendizaje en la educación superior: del diseño al uso

Abstract This study focuses on the uses that two groups of higher education students make of technological resources offered by an institution to build their own personal learning environments. The main thesis is that these uses depend on the techno-pedagogical design of the teaching and learning process in which the technological resources are framed. In order to explore and illustrate this thesis two instructional sequences have been analysed. Both use the same technological design, the Elgg platform, which allows users to select and organize a set of resources or widgets according to their interests and needs. The results show that in both cases the uses that students make of technology are related to the characteristics and requirements of the particular techno-pedagogical designs. We conclude that the key is not to offer technological resources to the students so they can build their own personal learning environments, but to design activities that attract and induce them to build these personal environments and to guide and support the process of construction.

Enhancing participation and learning in an online forum by providing information on educational influence / La información sobre el ejercicio de la influencia educativa como medio para favorecer la participación y el aprendizaje en un foro en línea

Abstract The information provided to participants regarding their activity is a key focus of recent studies aiming to improve the processes and outcomes of computer-supported collaborative learning. The information that is ultimately made available is linked to that considered to be important for online collaborative learning processes. The study presented here attaches special importance both to educational influence and to the distribution of this influence among the participants. Participants were 42 university students. They were given information regarding certain indicators of their participation in the forums, which were theoretically related to the exercise of educational influence at both group and individual levels. The objectives were to analyse the impact of information on the evolution of activity across the forums, and the relationship with the value that participants assigned to the forums and the usefulness of the forums in the learning process. The results indicated that only individual information had a significant impact on participation in subsequent forums. Future studies should incorporate questions related to the meaning that participants ascribe to the information provided to them.

Inducing student interaction in a virtual environment

In this paper we are reporting on an experimental research study. The study employed a mixed teaching procedure (traditional classroom -face to face- and virtual classroom). The purpose of the study was to induce student interactions in a virtual environment. The aim was to develop a series of specific skills by means of collaborative online work including collective essays and digital presentations.