ELI Web Seminar, March 3, 2008 1:00 p.m. ET (12:00 p.m. CT, 11:00 a.m. MT, 10:00 a.m. PT); runs one hour

Many Students Loosely Joined: Social Software to Support Distance Education Learners

Special Guest

Terry Anderson
Professor and Canada Research Chair, Distance Education
Athabasca University

For more than 30 years, Athabasca University has distinguished itself as a center for research and learning in distance education. As the Canada Research Chair in distance education, Terry Anderson is the principal investigator on a number of research initiatives including the eduSource Pan-Canadian Network of Learning Object Repositories, the Campus Alberta Repository of Education Objects (CAREO), the Course in a Box project, and the Alberta SuperNet Research Network. He has published widely in the area of distance education and educational technology and has coauthored or edited five books and numerous papers.

Anderson is active in provincial, national, and international distance education associations and a regular presenter at professional conferences. He teaches educational technology courses in Athabasca’s master’s and doctoral distance education programs, which are the largest of their kind in the world. He is also the director of the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research (CIDER) and the editor of the International Review of Research on Distance and Open Learning. Anderson received a BA in psychology and a bachelor of education in industrial arts from the University of Alberta and an MS in computer education from the University of Oregon. He completed a doctorate in education psychology at the University of Calgary, with a specialty in educational computer applications.

Summary

Julie Little, Interim Director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, will moderate this web seminar in which Terry Anderson will discuss the ways that emerging social software tools can create new approaches to online teaching and learning for both distance and blended learning.

Over the past decade, colleges and universities have increasingly turned to the web to increase student access, expand course offerings, and reach out to adult learners through online courses. The growth of distance and online education has been mirrored by a similar explosion in social software tools such as Facebook, Second Life, blogs, wikis, Flickr, and a host of Web 2.0 competitors that offer new ways for us to learn with and from each other. As our Web 2.0 toolbox grows, so do faculty and administrator concerns about control, privacy, assessment, and the effectiveness of these tools in the classroom.

In this seminar, Anderson will highlight an educational model for distance and online learning that leverages social software to help both learners and educators determine the most effective tool and granularity of application for their learning needs. He will also demonstrate a number of current and emerging tools and share practices that promise to help us learn from and with each other with an emphasis on social learning that includes groups, networks, and the collective.

Additional Resources

• Terry Anderson’s website
• Anderson, Terry and Elloumi, Faith, eds. "Theory and Practice of Online Learning"
• Roper, Alan. "How Students Develop Online Learning Skills"
• Dalsgaard, Christian. "Social Software: E-learning Beyond Learning Management Systems"
• Bryant, Todd. "Social Software in Academia"
• ELI’s 7 Things You Should Know About...: Blogs, Wikis, Facebook II, Virtual Worlds