Week 11: Electronic Motivation, Collaboration, and Communities of Learning/Inquiry

We had a special guest speaker Dr. Valerie O'Loughlin who is an Associate Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology this week. She used to teach Human Embryology and found that students hard to understand this thoroughly through pictures on the textbook so she design and build her Human Embryology Animations online. I am impressed by her intention to improve the effectiveness and usability of the tool when I first get into her website. There are several evaluation testing sites before and after you read or learn from the main topics. Just like what she mentioned during her presentation, it’s not easy to realize there are posttest with the sites, learners can go back to check whenever they want. In my personal opinion, I agree with her concern of sites without audio because a complicated topic is hard not only for an international student but also for Americans. There are so many professional words and technical terms, and learners need to pay attention only to the text itself to absorb fully. However, the choice should be basically depend on what kind of learning habits do her students (around the world because it is online) have and prefer. The preference her students like such as an Animation with audio format or an Animation without audio might affect her final decision. I think if possible, it would be better to have a simple survey at the end of this website to gather learners’ preferences about that issue rather than only depend upon suggestions from other professional books.

For this week reading, first one is “Building Sense of Community at a Distance”. This article disproves believe of limitation of community to the traditional classroom and suggest that the virtual classroom has the potential to build and sustain sense of community at levels that are comparable to the traditional classroom. Alfred Rovai (2002, April) points out some reasons that dropout rates tend to be higher in distance education programs than in traditional face-to-face programs. I realize from the article that adult sometimes only register for a course in order to obtain knowledge, not credits, and may therefore drop the course once they obtain the knowledge they desire.

Given a strong feeling of community can bring some benefits like retaining and increasing persistence in courses, increasing the flow of information among all learners, availability of support, commitment to group goals, cooperation among members, and satisfaction with group efforts. I agree with the author’s opinion because I believe deeply that technology should always come from humanity. There will be very much anxiety in distance programs, so building a community for learners to feel and satisfy their needs becomes crucial. Satisfy humanity first and then instructor can expect learners’ consistent dedicating to the distance programs.

The author also states that “sense of community” is mutual interdependence among members, sense of belonging, connectedness, spirit, trust, interactivity, common expectations, shared values and goals, and overlapping histories among members. To build and promote sense of community in distance programs, the author suggest instructors to consider factors such as transactional distance, social presence, social equality, small group activities, group facilitation, teaching style and learning stage, and community size.

In the second article I read, “Effective Virtual Teams through Communities of Practice”, Chris Kimble at al presents a framework for categorizing virtual teams and highlights some of the barriers to effective virtual team working and stress the importance of trust and social bonding improving the functioning of such teams. The authors first tell us different views at knowledge management (view knowledge management as opposites or a continuum), then define “virtual teams” as a micro-level form of matrix organization works toward a common goal usually, but not exclusively, using telecommunications and information systems. Later, in their first case study, they use ten different cases base upon different background countries to explore the concept and functioning of virtual teams. UK case is about a Computer Aided Software Engineering tool supplier and their main customer. “By providing a software tool to support remote tele-interactions between an expert and the client, the previous physical co-presence of these people is replaced by tele-mediated co-presence. In doing so, the geographical flexibility of the experts and the responsiveness of services have been improved significantly. This is especially so in urgent problem situations such as a system breakdown.”

I think those cases are valuable not only because evidence they gathered but also because their indicating of some common main technical and non-technical barriers to virtual teams.
In technical part-
1. The underdevelopment of a telecommunications infrastructure
2. The high cost using such services
3. Many existing ICTs have been developed for using in conventional
office environment
Non-technical part-
1. The constraints of time zones
2. Lack of non-verbal cues
3. Cultural differences between team members and problems of trust and
identity
Based on these barriers, design re-orientation of ICTs equivalent and systems, and develop new ways of sharing knowledge and understanding in the electronic space are suggested to do.
In the second case study, they find the importance of the physical space that sustains relationship through subsequent electronic communication. So they believe that Community of Practice enabled the physical and electronic space to be successfully integrated because trust and identity were built up through face-to-face communication in the physical environment, and carried over into the electronic space.

(PS. Community of Practice (CoP)- a set of relations among persons, activity and the world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice.)

The third article wrote by Ruth Brown (2001) also points out indispensability of existing of Community. Community meant, "support from people who share common joys and trials." Community-building referred to creating a sense of belonging, of continuity, of being connected to others and to ideas and value. Community of learners meant a group of people with "a shared purpose, good communication, and a climate with justice, discipline, caring, and occasions for celebration". It is especially unique that classify three levels of community, which are on-line acquaintances, community conferment, and camaraderie. There are some common rules whenever you are in a real community or effective virtual teams through Communities of Practice. It’s not a brand new idea, but there is just no one put this idea in advance into CoP.
From these articles, I realized that humanity should always be considered into design and application of learning and emerging technology because it is the substance of humans, and it is human nature. People need to communicate with others and live in a community like usual even if they are in a blended learning environment. So when designing these distant courses, it will be better to take electronic motivation, collaboration, and communities into consideration to deal with the shortage of distance learning and satisfy humanity. For example, ideas of collaboration platforms used as supporting environments addressed by one of the tidbits, Virtual Edge for Teams, might direct us one way of applications. “Where every team room follows the same consistent design principles and good practices, making it easy to go from room to room."
I am also glad that people are aware of these kinds of issues since if these continue to be valued, then there is no doubt that more people will want to learn from distance or online learning.

Reference:

Alfred Rovai (2002, April). Building Sense of Community at a Distance. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Retrieved August 21, 2007, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/viewFile/79/153

Ruth Brown (2001). Process of Community-Building in Distance Learning Classes. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Volume 5, Issue 2. http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v5n2/v5n2_brown.asp

Chris Kimble, Feng Li, & Alexis Barlow (2000). Effective Virtual Teams through Communities of Practice. Management Science: Theory, Method, and Practice. http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eps/io/papers/0504/0504006.pdf and http://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpio/0504006.html (abstract)

Virtual Edge for Teams: http://www.virtualteams.com/

Open Text Unveils Livelink virtualteams
http://www.opentext.com/news/pr.html?id=1224