Samuel Ebersole

Uses and Gratifications of the Web among Students

This study was designed to explore how some students in ten public schools view the WWW and how their attitudes and opinions affect their use of this new medium in an educational context. An exploratory principal components analysis of forty use statements resulted in an eight factor solution. Additionally, student responses to a computer-administered survey instrument were collected and analyzed revealing significant differences in the way that students describe their use of the WWW. Gender, grade level, and amount of time spent using the WWW were used to create between-group comparisons of the WWW use categories that made up the computer-administered survey instrument. The final phase of data analysis was a content analysis of sites visited by students. A total of 123,071 URLs were collected from the computers used to administer the computer survey instrument. These were reduced to a total of 500 sites that were reviewed by media specialists. Students were found to be visiting commercial sites at a much higher proportion than those in other domains. Also, the commercial sites received the lowest rating for “suitability for academic research” of all the domain names. And while students reported their purpose for using the WWW as “research and learning” fifty-two percent of the time, the coders found only twenty-seven percent of the sampled sites to be “suitable” for that purpose.

Using Non-Subject-Matter-Specific Discussion Boards to Build Connectedness in Online Learning.

The authors employed multiple data-collection procedures to determine which of four personal (non-subject-matter-specific) discussion folders would be used most frequently by online learners in two online courses, and which would be rated more favorably and considered more effective than other folders. The folders were studied for the way in which they (1) helped build a positive faculty-student relationship, (2) helped build positive relationships with fellow students, (3) helped foster a greater sense of community online, and (4) contributed to a higher degree of satisfaction with the overall learning experience. Overall, the use of the four personal discussion folders contributed most to building a more positive faculty-student relationship, followed by a greater sense of community.