Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference 2014

Jacksonville, Florida, United States

March 17-21, 2014

Building Online Learning Communities Using Web 2.0 Technologies

Mariam Abdelmalak, Ph.D.The New Valley College of EducationAssiut University

Agenda:• Overview• Why Is Building Online Learning Communities

Necessary?• What is Web 2.0 technology?• Web 2.0 technologies and Online Learning Communities • A Practice for Building Online Learning Communities• Students’ Perspectives

Face-to-Face Online Class

Why Is Building Online Learning Communities Necessary?

• Positive learning outcomes (Sadera, Robertson, Song, & Midon, 2009).

• Satisfaction with the learning experience (Rovai, Wighting, & Lucking, 2004).

• Enhanced learning achievement (LaPadula, 2003).

• Sense of well being (Walker, Wasserman & Wellman, 1994; Wellman & Gulia, 1999).

What Is Web 2.0 Technology?

• The term Web 2.0 began to be used for the first time in 2004 and referred to a second generation of the Internet (Schrum & Levin, 2009).

• Web 2.0 technologies allow users to add and change content easily, to collaborate and communicate instantaneously in order to share, develop, and distribute information, new applications, and new ideas (Schrum & Levin, 2009)

Web 2.0 Technologies & Online Learning Communities:

• Web 2.0 technologies can play an important role in the development of a learning community among students in online courses (Kearns &Frey, 2010; Palloff & Pratt, 2009; Gunawardena et al., 2009).

• The inclusion of a variety of Web 2.0 technologies can serve to facilitate the development of communities in an online course (Palloff & Pratt, 2009)

Google Documents

(www.twitter.com)• Twitter is a form of a social networking space that allows

for very short micro-blog entries known as “tweets” (Schrum & Levin, 2009).

• In 140 characters or less, people share ideas and resources, ask and answer questions, and collaborate on problems of practice.

• Twitter can enhance online learning communities (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009).

http://www.skype.com • Skype is an internet-based phone service that also allows

for conference calling, document sharing, and text messaging (Palloff & Pratt, 2009).

• Skype to be a good tool for building rapport and social presence among students and between students and faculty (Parker, Boase-Jelinek, &Herrington, 2011).

(https://drive.google.com)• Google Docs are free Web-based applications that allow

users to create word processing.

• Google Docs enable collaboration by editing a document written by other students, and by suggesting modifications through comment writing, without editing the document itself (Conner, 2008).

• Google Docs can be excellent resources to overcome students’ isolation (Reyna, 2010).

• A blog is a frequently updated online diary or journal; it can be used for news, reviews, personal thoughts, experiences, Web links, and photos (Schrum & Levin, 2009).

• Via blogs, students enjoy an opportunity to open the windows of communication – reading their classmates’ postings and having classmates comment on their own writing (Blackston, Spiri, & Naganuma, 2007; Windham, 2007).

Students who used the blogs did feel a greater satisfaction with the community and engagement as a result of using the blogs (Clake & Kinne, 2012) .

(http://www.pbworks.com), (https://www.wikispaces.com)

• A Wiki is a collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009).

• A Wikis allows people to directly edit, update, modify or delete. Wiki also allows multiple users from different locations to collaborate in real-time.

• A Wiki environment is an effective technology for building community (Lambert & Fisher, 2009; Scott & Liu, 2011).

A Practice for Building Online Learning Communities

Getting Started Module

SkypeGoogle email

Twitter

Students’ Perceptions• Students indicated that using Google

Documents, Wikis, Blogs, and Twitter gave them a sense of a learning community while using Skype did not give them this sense of community.

• Google Documents and Wikis had the most impact on students’ sense of a learning community in the course.

Google DocumentsThe students expressed that Google Documents

facilitated collaboration through the ability to:• edit documents written by other students from

anywhere and at any time, • share idea and information, and • suggest improvements by writing comments.

• Google Doc was a very useful tool for collaboration. Using Google Doc to communicate with my group gave me a sense of a learning community. We were able to work together while being apart and it made collaboration possible and we did not have to take time out of our lives to meet up in person somewhere but work at times that were convenient for us.

• Using Google Docs was one of the primary ways the groups I worked with communicated and collaborated. This technology provided a great sense of a learning community through the ways we used the Google Docs as an open forum. One group member could pose an idea or question and the rest of the group could add, edit or comment on the idea.

Sample of Students’ Perspectives

PBWorks Wiki

• The students expressed the Wiki project gave them a sense of a learning community through the ability to learn from each other, to share ideas and information, and to exchange comments.

• Some students explained that the commenting feature in the PBworks was an obstacle to their sense of a learning community

Sample of Students’ Perspectives• Wiki made the project much more interesting and

fun. It definitely felt a sense of community with my group. Wiki made it much easy to communicate even with someone like me live in El Paso and my group members living elsewhere.

• The commenting feature on the Wiki was a bit more tedious to work through because people who wanted to comment had to be added before they could do so. Since the wiki was limited to just a selected few in the class it didn’t give me the same sense of community as some of the other activities.

BlogsThe students expressed that using blogs gave

them a sense of community through: • using the commenting feature,• receiving feedback about their work from

their classmates, and • being able to see their classmates’ work.

Sample of Students’ Perspectives• I found the commenting feature on the blog very easy

to use and I enjoyed the feedback directly on my blog, which gave me a sense of a learning community. Commenting on blogs was like social media. I have never read a blog or written in a blog but I realized while doing it that it was just like MySpace or FaceBook. The learning community was strong and made me realize I have been doing that for my own pleasure numerous times just not for academia.

Twitter • The students expressed that using Twitter gave

them a sense of a learning community through the ability to share ideas not only with their classmates but also with others of the same interest.

• Some students expressed that using Twitter did not give them this sense of a learning community because of the limited use of Twitter for only one assignment or because of their preference to use Twitter for personal purposes.

Sample of Students’ Perspectives• By setting up a Twitter account I was able to get to know others

not only in our course but others in the same field as well. This gave a great sense of a learning community. I had a Twitter account previously but never used it for education purposes or career purposes. Now I have "friends" that are in the same field as I am and I get to see and hear about their experiences and crafts that they use in their own classrooms.

• For Twitter, I didn’t really feel the sense of learning community. It probably can be a useful tool but with Canvas and other Web 2.0 tools we used over the duration of the course I found it unnecessary. Perhaps if we used it more in more than one assignment it could be a useful collaborative tool.

Conclusion:

• Building and sustaining learning communities should be an essential dynamic in virtual classrooms. Web 2.0 technologies can promote students’ sense of learning communities in online classes. Yet, building online learning communities is a difficult task. However, doing so is an integral step for improving learning and teaching in online environments, and thus work in this area should continue.

References:

LaPadula, M. (2003). A comprehensive look at online student support services for distance learners. The American Journal of Distance Education, 17(2), 119–128.

Blackston, B., Spiri, J., & Naganuma, N. (2007). Blogs in English language teaching and learning: Pedagogical uses and student responses. Reflections on English Language Teaching (RELT), 6 (2), 1-19.Available

http://www.nus.edu.sg/celc/publications/RETL62/01to20blackstone.pdfClake, L. & Kinne, L. (2012). More than words: Investigating the format of asynchronous

discussions as threaded discussions or blogs. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 29 (1), pp. 4-13

Conner, N. (2008). Google Apps: The missing manual . O'Reilly Media Dunlap, J, & Lowenthal, P. (2009). Tweeting the night away: Using Twitter to enhance social

presence. Journal of Information Systems Education, 20(2), 129-135.Gunawardena, C., Hermans, M., Sanchez, D., Richmond, C., Bohley, M., & Tuttle, R. (2009). A

theoretical framework for building online communities of practice with social networking tools. Educational Media International, 46(1), 3–16.Kearns, L., & Frey, B. (2010). Web 2.0 technologies and back channel communication in an online

learning community. TechTrends, 54(4), 41-51.Lambert, J. & Fisher, J. (2009). Community Building in a Wiki-Based Distance Education

Course. In G. Siemens & C. Fulford (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2009 (pp. 1527-1531). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

ReferencesPalloff, R., & Pratt, K. (2009). Web 2.0 technologies and community building online. 25th Annual

conference on Distance Teaching & Learning. Retrieved August 15, 2013, from http://www.uwex.edu/disted/conference/Resource_library/proceedings/09_20002.pdf

Parker, J., Boase-Jelinek, D. & Herrington, J. (2011). Perceptions and reflections: Using Skype chat to build a community of learners. In Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2011 (pp. 1599-1604). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Rovai, A. P., Wighting, M. J., & Lucking, R. (2004). The classroom and school community inventory: Development, refinement, and validation of a self-report measure for educational research. Internet and Higher Education, 7, 263–280.

Sadera, W., Robertson, J., Song, L., & Midon, M. N. (2009). The role of community in online learning success. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 5(2), 277–284.

Schrum, L., & Levin, B (2009). Leading 21st century schools. Corwin.Walker, J., Wasserman, S., & Wellman, B. (1994). Statistical models for social support networks. In

S. Wasserman and J. Galaskiewicz (Eds.) Advances in Social Network Analysis. (p. 53-78) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Wellman, B., & Gulia, M. (1999). The network basis of social support: A network is more than the sum of its ties. In B. Wellman (Ed.). Networks in the Global Village. (p. 83-118) Boulder, CO.: Westview Press.

Windham, C. (2007). Reflecting, writing, and responding: Reasons students’ blog. Educause Learning Initiative paper. Retrieved April 2, 2009 from https://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI8006C.pdf

Q & A

Thank You