New research project

Well I happen to run across this link in Stephen O’daily’s blog.  I would like to do more resarch on voicethread.com.  This looks like an interactive video, like the tutroial I am trying to create for our final project.  I dont’ know much about it, but it seems to have it all.  You can talke picture and them write on them while recording so that others can see what you are doing. You can also speak while doing it.  This would be a more effective tutorial if I could speak as I pointed out what to do.  Do if I had to pick a topic in distance ed to research it would be the voicethread so that I could speak, write, and show pictures at the same time to get my point across.  Check it out and see what you think for yourself. 

Kearsley’s take on reasearch

While reading the

Online Education Learning and Teaching in Cyberspace

by Greg Kearsley, I thought came to me. I realized that this is Nate’s Bible. Ok, I am just joking, but it does seem that almost everything that I read is covered in this class. I have realized that Nate is trying to create a learning community for us to use in our endeavors through the educational technology program. This means that we are able to use our aggregates and still work and discuss together our problems and triumphs for years to come. Of course that is if we continue to blog. The only research that they discussed on that was the online coursed in an educational technology Leadership degree. They said of course that it was more beneficial to do online, but that lead itself to the technology part of the degree. I would think that they need to look at classes such as algebra and calculus and see if it is learned better over the internet or in a face to face classroom.

Kearsley also discussed the virtual conferences with I associated with our chats in TappedIn. This is a virtual conference to me because we are eliminating the travel time (for Nate that is a good thing) and cost of meeting space. I feel that with the speed of the world today, that face to face meetings are going to be extinct soon. With that being said, I have to discuss the WizIq website that could be use for a math conference. It is an interactive whiteboard that allows all the participants to discuss, draw, and speak as needed to each other. You can upload a powerpoint and anyone can advance it or mark on it. It was so neat because you could do all this as you talked. This to me will be utilized a lot more in the near future, especially for math conferences.

Research in general is not a well know thing in the area of online vs F2F classes and as Nate said last night they aren’t really reliable to tell you if one is good or not, just one is better than another. Research, as I tell my students, needs to be looked at carefully and use your own judgement. Especially, since I am math person, graphs can be altered to look however they want to make them look. So, research is credible, from a credible source with evidence.