Regina Collins

Learning within Digital Media: Investigating the Relationships Between Student Citation Networks, Assignment Structures, and Learning Outcomes

Students are comfortable sharing digital content with others, yet the effect of sharing of digital media for learning remains largely unexplored. Building on research in social network analysis and learning analytics, this research explores the use and sharing of digital media in learning activities, analyzing the effects of the design of the learning activities on the resulting networks of students and their cited resources, and exploring relationships between attributes of these citation networks and students’ perceptions of the learning outcomes. Results suggest that the extent to which an assignment is wellstructured and converges towards a single solution positively influences the density and clustering coefficient of the resulting citation network, and that these network measures in turn have a positive influence on students’ perceptions of learning from the assignment.

Knowledge Management for Learning: ICT System Affordances and the Impact of Order of Use

Knowledge management (KM) is an important activity in corporations and organizations and is well suited as a learning activity in higher education. However, integrating such activities for learning requires alignment between required activities and information technology (IT) system affordances. Using KM-based assignments requiring individual and collaborative (group) Internet-based research, this study explores the affordances of two different ITs: one the university’s learning management system, and the other a Web 2.0 social digital curation system (Pearltrees). Results suggest that, despite already being familiar with Moodle, students found Pearltrees not complex and generally compatible with their learning activities, although their perceptions were impacted by whether they used Pearltrees for the first or second assignment. Students’ comments indicated that mature discussion capabilities and a visual interface with the ability to organize digital resources were some of the most important affordances for tools used in KM learning activities.

Engaging individual learning through collaborative knowledge building processes: a hybrid framework

The globalisation of engineering teams has increasingly demanded technologies that support collaboration and knowledge sharing while also respecting the cultural and cognitive differences of individual team members. Existing collaborative knowledge building systems apply a one-size-fits-all approach to knowledge building, allowing individuals to contribute to collective knowledge but overlooking individual knowledge backgrounds, learning styles, and information needs; a hybrid framework is needed to apply the activities and benefits of collaborative knowledge building to an individual’s acquisition of knowledge. A system based upon such a framework encourages team members to share knowledge, resources, insights and opinions collaboratively, thus providing a rich experience of discussion, co-discovery and innovation. At the same time, these shared resources and discussions can be filtered to a personal learning space in which each individual team member can further explore and reflect on the resources best...

Open Knowledge Exchange Systems

The development of an Open Knowledge Exchange (OKE) system, designed to free knowledge dissemination from the bottleneck of traditional peer review methods, requires careful consideration of not only the technical capabilities such a system should provide, but also how users’ rights and privileges should be distributed amongst contributing authors, conference organizers, and registered system users/reviewers to ensure a fair and legitimate sociotechnical system. A survey was developed and administered to solicit input from prospective users regarding these issues. Survey results indicated that researchers’ assumptions of what would constitute a fair system did not always agree with users’ responses, particularly in the areas of paper rating, social networking functions, and required community participation.