Tony Carr

Evaluating the use of synchronous communication in two blended courses

Residential universities are increasingly integrating online interaction within courses in the form of synchronous online chats, asynchronous online discussions and access to interactive resources. This article evaluates the educational effectiveness of online chats within a Humanities postgraduate course and a final year Commerce course. We consider the roles of course design, group dynamics, and facilitation style in the successful use of online collaboration within primarily face-to-face courses, as well as the potential for online collaboration within a blended course design to facilitate more inclusive learning conversations than are possible with exclusively face-to-face interaction.

From peripheral to full participation in a blended trade bargaining simulation

This article considers the extent and nature of student participation in a trade bargaining simulation from a community of practice perspective. This third-year economics module included a blend of online communication (through email, online chats and online discussions) and face-to-face meetings, both in smaller bargaining groups and in whole class plenary meetings. Our method of analysis includes the use of Exchange Structure Analysis of text chats and face-to-face learning conversations, triangulated by observation, survey and interview data. The focus on community of practice enables us to offer a nuanced interpretation of differences in crude participation data derived from the online chats. Superficially, the data may suggest marginalisation of participants, but Wengers (1988) notion of peripheral participation with a trajectory towards full participation reframes the disparities in terms of an active community of practice. Some members are fully engaged with the practices of trade bargaining from the early stages of the simulation, while others move towards full participation over the duration of the simulation. Our results suggest that the laboratory-based online text chats did provide opportunities for student participation in the simulation, and that male and female students exhibited different patterns of participation in the chats.

Supporting Changing Cultures Through Emerging Practices

This chapter explores how an online conference can be productively used by educational technology professionals and educators who teach with technology in Africa to share and learn about tools, perspectives, and practices in the emerging field of educational technology with peers from across Africa and beyond. Communities of practice can play a key role in the professional development of educational technologists and educators learning to teach with technology. The impact of communities of practice on educational technology practices across a university is enhanced where educational technology professionals and change agent educators act as boundary professionals who can learn practices from encounters with related communities both locally and globally and then to transfer elements of these back home to their day-to-day practice. Such encounters can be stimulated through several means including face-to-face and online meetings and conversation, workshops, and conferences, whether face to face or online. We discuss how participants were able to use the affordances of an online conference to engage in boundary conversations across multiple communities of practice. From our experience, online conferences both echo and refashion face-to-face conferences.