Anthony Edwards

Unrestricted Student Blogging: Implications for Active Learning in a Virtual Text-Based Environment.

Realizing the potential for web-based communication provides a challenge for educators. The purpose here is to report students’ behavioural and cognitive strategies for active learning when using an unrestricted blog in an academic context. This provides insight into how students are making sense of the incorporation of Web 2.0 technology into higher education. An analytical framework was created to investigate the willingness and competence of students to engage in the social and virtual construction of knowledge. The analysis indicated that, while the students appear to have wanted to complete the task efficiently, the process of critically constructing knowledge was not pursued with vigour. The main implication is therefore that students need to either prepare themselves or be prepared by educators to combine their informal experience of communication technology with academic requirements for actively constructing knowledge in virtual environments.

Using Social Networks in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: An Australian Case Study

Realising the potential for web-based communication in learning and teaching is challenging for educators. In this paper, the authors examine students’ attitudes toward active learning when using an unrestricted blog in an academic context and whether this can be used to support reflective and critical discussion, leading to knowledge construction. The authors collected data using an online survey with questions on student perceptions of the type, frequency and effectiveness of their strategy. Analysis of the data was conducted using Bloom’s revised taxonomy. The research indicates that students must have prior familiarity with this form of communication technology to construct knowledge in an academic context. The authors conclude that effective learning will only emerge if informed by the student experience and perspective.

The Role of Outside Affordances in Developing Expertise in Online Collaborative Learning

Web 2.0 tools have introduced a dynamic aspect to learning in contemporary classrooms. Pre-service teachers require expertise in the use of these spaces. The metaphor of outsideness—engaging with distant peers using Web 2.0 tools—has affordances that support the development of this expertise. In this paper, a conceptual framework is outlined that links a model of developing expertise with the affordances of outsideness and a case study of pre-service teacher education is used to demonstrate the framework’s possibilities and limitations. Implications are drawn for the use of online collaborative spaces in higher education.

Questions from Afar: The Influence of Outsideness on Web-Based Conversation.

This paper defines the metaphor of outsideness in relation to web-based interaction. Outsideness is conceived of as a key influence in online academic conversation. In particular, through the sharing of cultural perspectives, asking questions to resolve doubt, and collaborative writing and re-writing as a basis for shaping ideas through reasoning. An analytical framework is proposed and applied to a case study of an international wiki-based project. Key findings are that there is a tension between participants’ sense of inside and outside influences, resulting in a complex and challenging working environment. Students require support to develop nuanced questioning and conversational skills, including multi-model forms of representation and communication to enhance language skills.

Learning in Technologically-Mediated Spaces in Open-Plan Settings

Networked learning environments disrupt the constitution of the conventional classroom. As part of the BEP each student was issued with a personal notebook computer, the assumption being that new technologies offered foundation possibilities for innovative teaching and learning.

Better than well-being: the scope of transhumanism in the context of educational philosophy

Philosophers continue to raise the question of the nature of the good life. Educational philosophers in particular seek to define the nature of well-being in order to direct educational endeavors appropriately, and much has been said about the different conceptions of well-being that educators look towards. In this paper we consider how transhumanists or posthumanists have attempted to think beyond well-being. Our purpose here is not to suggest that we have arrived at a meaning of being or well-being and that it is now time move on towards a transhuman future. On the contrary, the transhuman vision beyond the present tells us more, we argue, about the limitations of our understanding of the depth of well-being. What might seem like rather fantastical and fictional presentations of the goal of education are not as distant as they seem; the practical implications of modern technology increasingly require us to face the projection of humanity in our own image. It is argued that a theological conception of human nature will provide some insight into transcendence that transhumanism does not consider.

The Influence of 'Insideness' and 'Outsideness' on Learning in Collective Intelligence Systems

The knowledge society and social networking in particular has created affordances for learning through collective intelligence systems. However the learning preferences and approaches of neo-millennial students are both similar and different to traditional models of top-down education. In this conceptual paper, the metaphors of insideness and outsideness are used as an explanatory framework to identify these new affordances and to determine tensions and questions emerging in relation to individual agency.

Student Blogging: Implications for Learning in a Virtual Text-Based Environment

Realising the potential for web-based communication in learning and teaching is challenging for educators. The purpose of this paper is to report students’ attitudes and perception of active learning when using an unrestricted blog in an academic context. It will examine if an unrestricted blog can be used to support reflective and critical discussion leading to the construction of knowledge whether. Unrestricted in this context refers to autonomous individual and group activity undertaken in an unstructured online environment. It will attempt provide an insight into what students make of working at the intersection between academic and online environments. Data was collected using an online survey with questions focused on student perceptions of the type, frequency and effectiveness of their strategy use. Analysis of the resulting material was conducted using Bloom’s revised taxonomy to determine whether student strategy was useful in supporting the construction of knowledge. Our research indicates that students need to suitably prepare themselves or be prepared by others to make the most effective use of their prior familiarity with this form of communication technology (which is usually informal) in order to constructing knowledge in an academic context. Thus we conclude that effective learning will only emerge from considered pedagogical design, informed by the student experience and perspective.