Yuliang Liu

A Comparative Study of Learning Styles between Online and Traditional Students.

This comparative study was designed to investigate how online and traditional face-to-face (FtF) students used different learning styles in a graduate educational course. A nonequivalent control group design was employed. The study involved 19 students in an experimental group (online section) and 25 students in a control group (FtF section) in a graduate course in the Fall semester of 2004. Although no significant statistical differences were detected in learning styles at pretest, significant statistical differences were found in many learning style subscales at posttest between experimental and control groups. Specifically, at the end of the course, online students seemed to have a higher preference for peer interaction, competition, interaction with the instructor, details of the course materials, independence, authority, reading, direct experiences, and clear goal setting than their counterparts in the FtF section. No significant statistical differences were detected in learning performance between both groups. Implications resulted from the study.

Teachers’ attitudes toward technology integration in schools: a four‐year study

This trend study was designed to examine a current trend and pattern, as well as a development of teachers’ concerns about technology integration in the curriculum. The study was conducted by repeated cross‐sectional studies, applying the same research instrument to different samples of subjects at different points, over a period of four years during 2004–07. Two hundred and seventy‐five in‐service teachers in two graduate courses participated in the study at a Midwestern public university in the USA. The Stages of Concerns (SoC) Questionnaire was used to assess teachers’ seven stages of concern: Awareness, Informational, Personal, Management, Consequence, Collaboration, and Refocusing. This study found patterns of concern typical for teachers at different levels of their professional development as well as distinct and stable differences between technology user sub‐groups over four years. Specifically, (1) teachers’ concern profile as a whole were very intense in the stages of Informational, Personal, and Refocusing; (2) there were statistical significant differences in concern profile among teachers with three levels of perceptions of their technology implementation status; and (3) the concern profile for each of the three user groups did not support Hall, George, and Rutherford’s hypothesis of 1977 regarding the development of concern profiles for the three different user groups. International implications for teachers’ technology integration are discussed.

An exploratory study of the effects of frequency and duration of messaging on impression development in computer-mediated communication

This experimental study indicates that computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a viable mode of social-emotion-oriented communication. In this study, the effects of frequency and duration of messaging on impression development in CMC were investigated. Undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to each of the four experimental groups. For a period of 2 weeks, participants monitored discussion lists that differed in relation to the frequency and duration of messaging in asynchronous CMC environments. ANOVA results indicated that duration and frequency had significant main effects on impression development in asynchronous CMC environments. No interaction effects were found. The results of this study support the social-emotion-oriented model in CMC.

A preliminary study of the impact of online instruction on teachers’ technology concerns Yuliang Liu, Peter Theodore and Ellen Lavelle

The lead investigator taught a graduate online course, ‘Research Methods in Education’, at a Midwestern state university in the United States in the fall semester of 2001. Twenty-three participants were recruited from those enrolled in an online section of that course. Participants were then asked to complete consent forms and demographic surveys. All participants were in-service teachers, and a majority were in their first or second year of graduate studies in education. This study involved a single-group, pretest-posttest design. Specifically, the participants were pretested to measure the initial state of learner characteristics before online instruction with the SoC Questionnaire in the first week face-to-face orientation in the fall semester of 2001. Subsequently, the participants were exposed to the online WebCT environment from the second week through to the final week. During the final week the participants were posttested online with the same instrument to measure the developmental state of those characteristics affected by online instruction over the semester. The mean differences on each of the seven scales in the SoC Questionnaire were statistically tested to determine whether there were any significant differences in the concerns instrument.

Academic domains as political battlegrounds : a global enquiry by 99 academics in the fields of education and technology

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses as a case study the academic domain of education and technology to examine this question. Its authorship approach is innovative, with a worldwide collection of academics (99 authors) collaborating to address the proposed question based on their reflections on daily social and academic practices. This collaboration followed a three-round process of contributions via email. Analysis of these scholars’ reflective accounts was carried out, and a theoretical proposition was established from this analysis. The proposition is of a mutual (yet not necessarily balanced) power (and therefore political) relationship between the human and non-human constituents of an academic realm, with the two shaping one another. One implication of this proposition is that these non-human elements exist as political ‘actors’, just like their human counterparts, having ‘agency’ – which they exercise over humans. This turns academic domains into political (functional or dysfunctional) ‘battlefields’ wherein both humans and non-humans engage in political activities and actions that form the identity of the academic domain.