#aufgs2012 Viviane Vladimirshi Exploratory study of cross-cultural engagment in the community of #inquiry: instructor perspectives and challenges

Viviane Vladimirschi has finished a thesis on the subject of Exploratory study of cross-cultural engagment in the community of inquiry: instructor perspectives and challenges April 2012 and you can find the full thesis here:
 http://hdl.handle.net/10791/15

During the Athabasca University conference she gave a talk on her research and used methodology (also part grounded theory).

The purpose of this study was to explore how instructors of online courses accommodate and make provisions for culturally diverse learners in an online community of inquiry. Ten instructors from two Alberta higher education institutions participated in two phases of research. To explore this phenomenon in the CoI model, intercultural competency indicators were created to test how they could develop and expand teaching and social presence in a cross-cultural environment. In the first phase, analysis of the open-ended survey questionnaire (AMEQ) revealed that in the absence of any cross-cultural design, instructors use facilitation and open communication strategies to foster learning and prevent conflict. The second phase, informed by the first phase, involved augmenting the original 34-item CoI survey instrument. Additional roles that relate to instructor cross-cultural efficacy were incorporated into both teaching presence and social presence elements in the CoI survey instrument. The revised 37-item CoI survey instrument was then administered to the same respondents for face validity. Findings revealed that the incorporated cultural indicators correlated highly with the teaching and social indicators, indicating their usefulness to measure multicultural efficacy in the CoI model.

The cultural indicators Viviane used were very interesting. So a good read if you are interested in the content.

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PhD thesis on tagging learning resources in a multilangual context

For years people are pushed to tag their learning resources, but I often wondered whether these tagged resources actually do get reused? Or whether tagging between peers that live in various parts of the world only works in theory, but does in fact not result in sharing resources in actual learning life. But here comes Riina with a clear answer to these questions.

Some great shared learning resources have been around for some years: the Open Educational Resources Commons, which was set-up by ISKME which was launched Februari 2007 and has strong partners e.g. UNESCO, OER commons works with tags a lot. Another renowned one is of course the MIT opencourseware, but then the latter does not use tags much.

There are also other smaller scale projects that share their learning resources. Together with other ITM-people I am working on an eLearning partnership that enables all to exchange learning modules, hence decreasing all our time in developing online courses, because we divide the workload and at the same time enabling us all to share our content/elearning knowledge across many different settings. This is way I was thrilled reading the phd in question that covers sharing learning resources across borders and more specifically how tags work in those situations.
At the same time, I sometimes wonder what happens with any Dutch work I write? How can people find Dutch papers, or articles in any other language, if they only have tags to go on (which are sometimes quite different depending on the language). Of course tagging in different languages for the same written document might be an answer, but Riina offers a far more interesting and workable solution, which relies on networks underlying the content based mainly on the three factors: user, item, tag.

Riina Vuorikari wrote her phd entitled "Tags and self-organisation: a metadata ecology for learning resources in a multilingual context", and in the introduction she describes the main ideas behind it:

"Social tags offer an interesting aspect to study learning resources, its metadata
and how users interact with them in a multilingual context. Tags, as opposed to conventional metadata description such as Learning Object Metadata (LOM), are free, non-hierarchical keywords that end-users associate with a digital artefact, e.g. a learning resource. Tags are formed by a triple of (user,item,tag).
Tags and the resulting networks, folksonomies, are commonly modelled as tripartite hypergraphs. This ternary relational structure gives rise to a number of novel relations to better understand, capture and model contextual information. The (user,item) relationship is a parameter of the interaction between a user and the learning resource. In the (user,tag) relation, on the other hand, tags are regarded as part of the user model that reflects user’s interests and intentions. The full relational structure emphasises the (item,tag) relation that allows tags to be part of describing the item that they are related to (e.g. a learning resource). Additionally, the (item,tag) relation can be extended to the metadata of the item (e.g. LOM), from which an additional relationship (tag,LOM) is inferred."

The thesis describes two exploratory studies and "introduces a trilogy of studies focusing on self-organisation, flexibility and robustness of a social tagging system using empirical, behavioural data captured from log-files and user’s attention metadata trails on a number of learning resource portals and platforms in a multilingual context."

This is a very interesting thesis (181 pages) on tagging and how to get the most out of it.

(photo information from thesis: Figure 8.1. A learning network: a social network graph of about 5000 eTwinning teachers connected through common projects. The nodes are teachers and the edges are common projects (Breuer, Klamma, Cao & Vuorikari, 2009).

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