A colleague of mine recently shared that a friend of his in Texas had suffered a terrible accident and was in a coma. To make matters worse, the man’s wife was 8 months pregnant at the time of the accident. I offered to pray for him. A month has passed, so I asked my colleague…
Great news about online learning from the Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning report released by the U.S. Department of Education in June — students perform better in online environments than in traditional face-to-face instruction. But, how do we know this? The study is based on a meta-analysis of roughly 99 studies published between…
Mike Wesch illustrates that finding information was laborious before the web, but not necessarily less complex.
Posted in web science by monica [For the full entry, please see the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme wiki] During her presentation to our SDP group, Wendy Hall mentioned that if two people type the same thing into Google, regardless of their purpose for the search, they will get the same results. Jim Hendler…
While still in many ways an elusive topic, the study and definitions of web science became more tangible during our SDP discussions. Before attending OII, I thought web science simply meant the study of how people use the Web. This definition in many ways reflected my disciplinary bias by focusing on the who of the…
Online literacy is currently a moving target. Whenever a new online communication tool emerges, it seems that those who study it attempt to re-define literacy practice in terms of the new tool’s features…for example, engagement, participation, dynamic content, data filtering, hyperlinks. True, a moving target is hard to study, but if we know a little…
The Trouble with Information: How students gather and evaluate online resources. Intro: Increasingly, university students are required to find and synthesize online resources to complete academic assignments. I’m interested in studying the process students use to complete these assignments…where do they start, what are their priorities, where do they go and how much time do…
When I started my dissertation research, I struggled to describe what I was doing. Was I studying online reading, digital literacy, information processing? While the exact phrasing is still up for grabs, I understand the process, the experience I’m studying. I’m studying how students use online resources to complete academic assignments. Specifically, I’m trying to…
The Body Shop in Santa Barbara closed this month. I stopped by last week to see movers actually taking out the last of the boxes. Most people may not know, but for a while the majority of Body Shops were franchised, to empower women to become small business owners. Our local Body Shop was franchised…