When I first began the PhD program, my advisor and friend, Dr. Priscilla Norton spoke of the process into which I was going as a ‘journey’. Positive and negative events along the way were ‘all part of the journey’. Like any journey - or any that are worthwhile, interesting, and filled with new discoveries - there are twists and turns, diversions, dead-ends, and interesting side trips along the way.
At GMU I wear two hats. In the spring of 2000, I started on my studies in the PhD in Education program. My goal, as stated at the time, was, “exploring and influencing the impact and the future of technology in education from the perspective of one who is a classroom teacher first, and technologist second.” My immediate plan was to carry out this exploration from within the public schools. It came to pass, however, that I was offered the opportunity to teach with Dr. Priscilla Norton in the Integrating Technology in Schools (ITS) program at GMU, an opportunity that could not be passed up.
I find myself, then, at George Mason, in a dual role - both student and teacher. As a student in the PhD program I am following a course of study which informs and influences the practice of teaching in the ITS program and other classes. I divide my activities into two arenas - Academic and Professional.
Within the realm of both teaching and learning, three themes emerge that are shared between the two. I find myself in the interesting position of being both a student and an instructor of those cognitive areas:
It is from this perspective that I attempt to define the framework of my present and future work at Mason as I move towards the culmination of my studies. One notable revelation of the past semester is that I am suddenly (who has time to pay attention?) unable to distinguish my academic activities from my professional. There is a blurring of the distinction between work and school. I find that I am now teaching things that I am learning about and learning about things that I am teaching. The lines between teaching and learning, work and school, professional and academic life are erased to the point where there is virtually no difference between the two. All teaching is learning. All learning is teaching.
I taught in the public schools for 15 years before I became a Coordinator of Instructional Technology. This is my professional ground from which most everything else I am doing stems. It was as Coordinator that I enrolled in the ITS program at Mason. I had no idea that it would, but the cohort experience had a far greater impact on my views of teaching and learning than I expected. Perhaps the most interesting part of this experience was the notion of information acquisition and management. Today's students are faced with an extraordinary amounts and types of information which must be processed in order for them to make meaning of their environment. Developing lessons utilizing a variety of tools (telecommunications,, databases, spreadsheets, hypermedia, TV/Video) , was invaluable to me and helped me see the efficacy of our infusion of technology into our schools. This, more than anything has helped shape my view of technology in teaching and of curriculum in general. My thinking was further developed through a series of essays (telecommunication essay, database essay, graphics essay, written to justify the use of those tools in lessons. This forced me to rely on readings and class discussions and a great deal of reflection, in order to describe technology's place.
Overall, the ITS experience led to a reawakening in me in terms of curriculum and instructional design (it had been 20 years since undergrad) and a reorienting in my thinking towards how students learn and the role technology should play.
This experience was my introduction to a different way of thinking in terms of instructional design. I continue to learn more about this through interactions with my students in the ITS cohorts that I teach.
In the beginning, it was IT that brought me to Mason for the Master's program. I am still concerned about the successful integration of technology into the schools. All too often, I still see that the technology comes first - before the needs of the students. The integration is not useful and it is forced.
One area that I have developed an interest in is that of portfolio assessment. During a class with Dr. Kelly I had occasion to write a paper on Electronic Portfolio assessment. I find now that I am teaching a class in Electronic Portfolio inasmuch as the GSE has whole heartedly endorsed the evaluation of student's progress through Portfolios.
From the outset, my professional specialization in the PhD program was built on the study of online learning. The bulk of the work that I have done in my area of specialization has been with the Integrating Technology in Schools Online Certificate (ITSOLC) courses. Under the direction of Dr. Norton, a group of doctoral students undertook to create an online version of the Integrating Technology in Schools (ITS) Certificate Program. This 12-credit series of courses is designed to provide practicing teachers knowledge and skills for integrating technology in schools.
In the office, among my peers and advisor, I am somewhat of a skeptic of the online teaching and learning process. I often find myself playing devil's advocate. I think, though, that this is healthy for me, the others, and the program. I have a number of concerns that I would like to address through research in this area.
The area that interests me the most is that of communication and interaction online. Through study in the area of social construction of knowledge, we learn from Vygotsky and others that interaction is key to cognitive development. The ITS program taught us that we need to rely less on the teacher for direct instruction and more on the instructor for creating designs for instruction that will facilitate learning experiences in a social context. This, then, begs the question, how can students who are participating in a course online - generally at a distance from both the instructor and other students - develop knowledge from peers? Can the constructs of interpersonal interaction that we have come to rely on in face-to-face situations be replicated in an online environment?
In the ITS program, we rely heavily on small group work and interaction among the students. We have found over the years that, through this interaction, students are able to share their views on topics as well as gain insight from their peers. This, negotiated meaning, to me, is the hallmark of the ITS program. There are very few activities in the program that students do completely on their own.
We began work on the on-line version of the ITS Certificate program in the spring of 2001. Initially, our discussions and work centered around the existing syllabi for the certificate program and how the activities might be translated into an online environment. Concurrently, we studied the problems we would face in providing coursework, evaluations, and feedback to students who we would never see face-to-face. Conceptually, we were able to make the modifications to the courses to allow for working off-site and submitting the products via e-mail attachments. A trial group of 'mentees' was formed in Fauquier County who have nearly completed the program.
It was determined early on that there would be a significant difference between this program and others that simply provided content from a distance. Those of us who would work with the participants were seen in the role of mentors, rather than instructors. Our function would be to act as guides to enhance the participants' understanding of the concepts in the courses, and to help bridge to classroom practice. Clearly, our interactions with mentees had to be robust and a relationship needed to be formed with those with whom we worked.
We also found it necessary to investigate the idea of self-regulation in completing the work in the courses. Obviously, since we did not meet in a face-to-face environment, the mentees were left to complete work on their own. This necessitated some guidance or framework in the course for pacing. A student check-sheet was created and put online for the mentees to print. This allowed them to monitor and record their progress. We also created a mentor check-sheet with cues and evaluation criteria for each activity. Mindful of our earlier research on the virtual instructor and virtual classmates, I wondered if the interaction between mentor and mentee is enough to sustain the interest and motivation sometimes of the student. My preference would be to attempt to foster communication between the student and their peers. The Qualitative and Quantitative research courses gave me the opportunity to look into methods for interacting on a larger scale. As part of the work of those classes, I designed studies to assess the impact on synchronous chatting with peers as part of a WebBased Learning course that I was teaching. I sought to discover the effects on the attitudes and perceptions of learning of the participants in the chats. Additionally, I wanted to discover how students reacted to an interactive chat with a relatively large number of participants.
I have always considered myself a good teacher. I find it easy and enjoyable to work with students of any age. Working with the mentees (in the pilot group for ITSOLC, I had only one mentee - others assigned to me dropped the program early on), however, presented me with a number of challenges to face. First and foremost, a working relationship must be formed via e-mail communication. I have found that creating the relationship is somewhat different that in a face-to-face environment. Body language, inflections, and the like are lost to you and I find that those types of non-verbal communication cues must either be translated into text for e-mail, or communicated in other ways. I have had to learn new ways of expressing thoughts and ideas about the work in the course. This, in turn, has made me much more reflective about the goals of the certificate program and the all-important bridge to practice. I think that I have become much more knowledgeable about the concepts in the class as a result of having to interact with students in this way.
In the fall of 2001, Dr. Norton and I conducted a class where the participants were geographically separated. To facilitate the interactions and learning opportunities, we created a model for conducting the class that involved 3 modes - face-to-face in a large group setting with the instructor; interacting online using a discussion board; and working together face-to-face in a small group setting without the instructor. We conducted research and discovered that the participants overwhelmingly preferred the small group, face-to-face method. They reported higher level of learning as well as a higher degree of interaction. This suggests to us that, in designing distance learning opportunities, it is worthwhile to investigate the possibility of giving students the chance to work together face-to-face. Dr. Norton summed it up well when she remarked that we had discovered “that you can have a virtual instructor, but not virtual classmates”.
I think that, if we are to see effective online courses implemented while remaining true to a constructivist notion of knowledge acquisition, we need to look at how we design learning environments online. There are a number of tools available for communication that can be leveraged to this task. Particular attention must be given to both the tools that are employed in online courses and the design of the learning environment and tasks.
Now that I am beginning to formulate a framework for my dissertation research. I am deconstructing online teaching and learning in order to come to some sense of the component parts. I can't help but attempt (to the degree possible) to compare all facets of my face-to-face teaching with analogous components in online courses:
conference/discussion/mentoring Email conferencing/mentoring small group work/discussion Discussion Board/chat My gut feeling concerning online learning is that we are well on our way to perfecting it but we are not there yet. It is my hope that my dissertation study as well as the research of others will shed light on the best direction in which to proceed.