Aaron’s CSCL Fall 2006 Blog

I think one of the most interesting and useful things I learned this year was that collaborating at a distance using computer support is a skill and a new form of communication that has to be learned and practiced. Also, the ability to explicitly state the disadvantages and advantages of working this way.

Now is an interesting time for this kind of work because we are in a paradigm shift from feeling the need to work and collaborate face to face, to feeling comfortable using communication technology to do the same work at and distance and asynchronously. The comfort among the general public to work together without feeling restricted by time and location is going to increase, if not skyrocket in the coming years. Having had the chance to learning-while-doing this kind of communication before it becomes a tacit skill and a norm for everyone was a great opportunity.

I look forward to the opportunity to work with groups who want to implement this kind of communication, learning, and work environment, and to share with them my experiences and knowledge. I already find myself doing this with people in my parents and grandparents generations that have not been able to keep up the exponential growth that the possibilities of technology bring us in communicating and working together. Often, I am talking with family members and friends as they describe something they wish to do, and I am able to guide them in the direction of a technological solution that they had not heard of, and possibly open even greater opportunities for them to communicate and work with friends and family.

Again, for me the greatest value of this course was to learn about CSCL while doing it, and the opportunity to analyze it in action.

Collaborative writing can be very difficult.  This is especially true in a CSCL environment.  One of the technical difficulties is not being about to edit a page at the same time another member of your team is editing it.  Also, communication is slower using chat.  Staying in constant communication with your group is important, as always.  It was hard to make the paper flow like one person wrote it.  I feel like after a group has gone through this process once or twice and has a chance to reflect on the experience and apply lessons learned, this process could become much quicker and easier.

Using audio/video conferencing might help the process move faster than just using chat.  Overall I find the process very interesting.  I am interested in the way large bodies of information can be formed in text by many people using computers.  An example of this is Wikipedia.  It is fastenating how distributing the process of writing, or anything for that matter, using computers and the internet can yeld such volumous and quality results.

I think collaborative writing has a bright future.  When the technical hurdle of team members being able to edit the same document at the same time gets solved, and audio/video communications get better over the internet, collaborative writing, especially sychronous collaboratove writing, will happen more often.

I think it is important to understand the way people cooperate, collaborate, and learn in groups. These aspects of CSCL can be applied outside of CSCL environments to design group work in regular classrooms. In almost all learning environments and situations there is some sort of CSCL involved inside or outside the organized stucture of the class. For example, students often collaborate or cooperate outside of class using chat or email.
There are some questions I have about CSCL. Such as, is there any research that shows what kind of learning is the most difficult to accomplish using CSCL, or some sort of description of the difficulty in learning at the different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy? What are the situations in which to use CSCL? What are best practices for CSCL at the high school level?

One of my interests is how technology can enable K12 school reform. CSCL is an important facet in how we can change learning evironments and experiences to make teaching and learning more affective and more efficient in terms of time and resources.

The link I posted to my website in my introduction was not working.  I corrected it in the post.  Here is the correct link http://www.a-smith.net

Aaron

I read Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research. The author described the definition of a weblog which I think is very important for people to understand. There are certain parameters that a web page must have inorder to be considered a weblog. The author also defined personal knowledge publishing and knowledge logging. He seemed to describe these as different entities, although I feel that they are becoming less distinct. There are many blogs that fit strictly to one of the authors definitions, but in my experience most personal blogs are a mixture of the three. Furthermore, they can change over time fitting closer with one definition during one range of time and aligning closer with another at a different range.
Another interesting and important point he wrote about was how weblogs foster quality. I think there are pros and cons to this process. For example, a weblog can be quickly and easily reviewed by many more people than normal peer-reviewed reseach. However, there is no control of the selection of the reviewers. Blogs can become very popular by a democratic process, but that process might not always lead to the best knowledge or research becoming the most popular.

I like the author’s ideas about shared knowledge. The rate at which we can accomplish tasks has increased greatly because of technology. The same is happening with the rate we can aquire information and gain knowledge. Blogs provide an informal way for academics to share ideas. It this way ideas for research can be culture much quicker.

Your goals or expectations for taking this course

I hope to learn about theories and best-practices associated with collaborative learning environments. My goal is to better understand how to design and manage a computer supported collaborative learning environment by the end of the course.
An educational experience that has had a big impact on who you are today

In 2001 I started taking courses in the UTeach program at UT. The UTeach program is a teacher preparation program that is a partnership between the College of Education and the College of Natural Sciences. It allows students to take education courses while working on their degrees in math, science, or computer science. At the end of the program they are able to take the state of Texas teacher certification exam and become a certified teacher in their subject area.

This program had a big impact on me. I got to know a lot of the students and faculty and we were all able to bond over our common passion for education. The faculty and staff in the program were some of the most dedicated people I had ever meet and are role-models for me still to this day. Also, without being able to get a degree in natural sciences in combination with education courses, I might not have chosen to go into education.

Your special interests and hobbies

I am very interested in the effects of technology on education policy and planning, specifically, how technology enables high school reform models and best-practices for those models. I am also interested in research focused on the transition of students from secondary to post-secondary education.

My other hobbies and interests are running, environmentalism, and all kinds of technology and gadgets. My webpage will probably give you a good idea of what I am into: www.a-smith.net
Interesting things about yourself that you want to share with other member

There really isn’t anything that interesting about me. I am pretty much a normal guy. Oh wait…I have a longhorn tattoo. That’s pretty interesting I guess?