Hanna M. Olsson

Knowing My Peers: Edentity – To Invite Peer Interaction and Social Learning

Digital spaces designated for learning need to invite to social learning. Oftentimes, however, students express feelings of loneliness in their learning in online courses. Making the students more visible to each other is hence crucial. In this article we present a study of students’ self-presentations. We find that they are rather unelaborated, and we propose an alternative solution to making students identities visible within the learning space. Our proposed solution is a separate system that can be plugged into any digital learning system: the edentity.

Role of feedback in uniform learning situation

In this paper, we explore feedback in a Digital Learning Environment (DLE), based on a study performed in a Swedish military training context. DLEs make uniform learning possible, while allowing interaction (as opposed to a text book). However, it is unclear how interaction should be designed to be beneficial in a uniform learning situation. Feedback is needed in DLE, both for the learning itself, and for the functionality of the system. Through an evaluation framework the uniform learning situation is evaluated and feedback is mapped onto interaction lanes. Balanced feedback has the potential to offer a beneficial DLE for uniform learning. Although the importance of feedback is known in theory, our study shows that practical implementations lack complete feedback. Hence, we propose a design guideline to implement balanced (relative to the framework) feedback in general, and to pay specific attention to Feed-Forward when designing DLEs.

Towards Ways to Promote Interaction in Digital Learning Spaces

Social learning is dependent on social interactions. I am exploring ways to promote interaction in Digital Learning Spaces. As theoretical framework I use the types of interaction between learner, instructor and content. That learners feel isolated and lonely in DLSs is a problem which comes at high cost for social learning. My aim is to promote social interaction by offering the edentity: a system for making participants visible to each other by creation of a digital student identity.