The Impact of Content Type on Educational Dialogues

1
The Impact of Content Type on Educational
Dialogues

• Andrew Pyper and Mariana Lilley
• University of Hertfordshire

2
Background

• Importance of social/ collaborative work
• The sheer amount of information students have to
  contend with
• Impact of technology on this

3
Learning Content Types

• Disposable
• Durable

4
Disposable Content

• Usually a by product of some conversation/
  learning activity
• Not intrinsically useful
• Without technology little, if any, of this type
  of content is retained
• Transient

5
Durable Learning Content

• The intended product of some learning and
  teaching activity.
• Egs- essays, books, wikis
• Independence from context
• Potential for re-use

6
An example-tutorial

• A face to face discussion
• An online discussion

7
Implications

• Using technology makes it much more likely that
  learning content will be stored
• We argue that this is a problem when disposable
  learning content is stored
• Particularly a problem where an educational
  dialogue is taking place.

8
Discussion Forums

• Discussion forums especially vulnerable
• Support educational dialogues, but store
  disposable learning content
• Hence, the focus of our study

9
The Study

• Attempted to create a separation between
  disposable and durable content using discussion
  forums.
• Discussion forum properties
• Fully anonymous postings by students (staff still
  post under their names)
• Limited duration
• Student summaries of discussion
• Temporary (deleted after a time).

10
The Study

• Invited students to join the discussion forums
• Discussion Subjects- Difference between a
  scripting language and a programming language and
  the Likert Scale

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Results- Posting Activity
First set of forums
12
Results- Posting Activity
Second set of forums (student review of
the first set of discussions)
13
Results
14
Results

• Indications that there was an effective
  separation between disposable and durable
  learning content
• Some support from student comments and the way
  they responded to discussion

15
Student Comments

• A lot of time and effort must have gone into the
  contributions made to each discussion therefore I
  vote to keep the discussion but close it off from
  further postings once it has expired
• I do plan on reading all the messages on the
  thread again and saving what I think is useful
• I think it is nice to keep the discussion
  archived, for future reference
• It is the student's choice if they choose to
  browse thru a long list of postings