5. Issue

Editorial

Some thought about the evolution of e-learning

More and more of us live in two worlds: the physical and digital world. In the physical world we are embedded in traditional social communities (Gemeinschaften) that rely on local proximity, strong reciprocal bonds of kinship, reliance, obligation and mutual benefit (Tönnies 1887). Internet-based social networks, platforms and communities are complementing this concept and they are partly changing its meaning. In the digital world the significance of physical location takes a second place to symbolic interaction processes in which competences and the reciprocal negotiation of trust relationships takes a leading role. Thus, “the traditional character of communities linking people in places and establishing real, organic and sustainable connections between them is widened to linking people wherever they are” (Welman 2001). This offers new options to the members of a social network. For example, Mark Granovetter (1973) emphasizes “the strength of weak ties”. What he means by this is the observation that members of a social community with close interpersonal relationships (strong ties) are often less helpful in the solution of one’s specific problem than those to which only weak ties exist but who are more competent in the solution space. He provided empirical evidence for this hypothesis for the problem of job search. Followers have tested this hypothesis on other problems as well.

In the physical world we acquire value, skills and knowledge from people in our environment, in classrooms, lecture halls, laboratories or hospitals, and from physical resources like books, journals, from equipment and tangible instruments. In the digital world we are confronted with a drastically increasing amount of information sources, with virtual environments, virtual realities, even virtual worlds like second life. Also in science the digital world becomes indispensible with its potential to make research information of all kinds accessible over the Internet. Open access movements around the globe try to overcome the print-on-paper age with expensive – for many institutions and countries unaffordable – subscription models. They benefit individual researchers with increased visibility, use and impact of their work but also the society at large with enhanced access to research findings and educational materials.

Web 2.0 with its participatory and interactive media and the Semantic Web are providing further dimensions to the digital world that need to be explored. All this has a tremendous impact on learning and education that is far from understood, both advantages and risks. The growing amount of online resources, for instance, offers ample opportunities for smoothly combining informal and formal learning experiences. If the online resources are, in addition, decorated with machine-readable semantic data, options exist to generate individualized learning paths automatically (see, e.g., http://didaskon.corrib.org/). The contributions of this issue shed some light in different corners of this largely unexplored research space.

The articles of this issue

In his article entitled “Is There a Net Gener in the House?“ Rolf Schulmeister, a pioneer in e-learning, critically investigates the question whether a net generation really exists, in the sense that its members learn differently than earlier generations and exhibit further common attributes that distinguish them from other generations. Schulmeister presents his conclusions of a decent analysis of a range of empirical studies published in books and scientific articles of professional authors like Prensky, Tapscott, Oblinger & Oblinger and others. He critically investigates the authors’ claims and analysis methods and argues for subtle differentiation of observations made and classifications derived from them.

Pinkwart, Aleven, Ashley, and Lynch introduce an adaptive tutoring system aimed to help law students in acquiring argumentation skills and practice strategies in structuring the proper flow of arguments and counter-arguments in legal texts like opinions and protocols. Their tool imposes a diagrammatic representation of such structures upon legal texts. In the construction of feedback to student actions the tool designers had to find special solutions as – other than in natural and engineering sciences - the subject domain is not well structured and the solution space does not offer a unique or best solution.

The article “Onlinestudie: Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten im Web 2.0“ (in German) presents and discusses the findings of an online survey on the use of Web 2.0 tools in science. The authors evaluate the potential of such tools and address possible negative impacts of their use on scientific practices. The survey was conducted in a research project investigating the character of scientific work in Web 2.0 from different angles. In section “Project Presentations”, the first author of this article sketches another outcome of this project: a Web 2.0 type of software supporting academic writing, scholarz.net.

A “Socioeconomic Approach to the Development of E-Learning” is adopted by Henrik Johannsen Duus. Starting with a summary of previous attempts to classify different types of e-learning, the author criticizes pedagogical, technological, or organizational categories used in earlier studies and reveals methodological weaknesses of these analyses. Using economic, sociological, and marketing theories as the basis for distinguishing characteristics, he initially suggest the separation of e-learning industries in two categories, knowledge transfer and knowledge creation. Duus then refines the classification by adding two new dimensions: “Business orientation vs. academic orientation” and “learning orientation vs. teaching orientation”. This leads to a separation into four e-learning paradigms: the technological, content-based, pedagogical, and the market-based paradigm.

The last article in this issue presents the analysis of an online mathematical problem solving course for teachers in the second semester of a Graduate Diploma Program at the Batu Linfang Teachers’ Institute in Sarawak, Malaysia. The authors partly replicate previous findings but add a novel perspective by training mathematical problem solving based on Polya's method. They use quantitative and qualitative methods (questionnaires and interviews, respectively) to measure the students' satisfaction, the improvement of their skills and the impact on demographic characteristics.

Project Presentations

Besides the report on scholarz.net, this section introduces a virtual teaching assistant that was developed in the VITA project and has been implemented as an extension to the course authoring and learning management system LON-CAPA. The assistant supports instant correctness checking and grading of homework assignments and it offers a peer-teaching feature for students to help each other solving the assignments.

The “ambient computing education” project aims to advance student mobility across the Atlantic with pilot student exchanges, the provision of a contemporary curriculum addressing society’s growing need for transdisciplinary knowledge and skills, and a technical infrastructure including Web 2.0 services, social networking features and access to online knowledge resources.

The third report “Leveraging Informality within eLearning” particularly addresses the skills and competences of “Schulmeister’s net generation” in mastering computers, in general, and Web 2.0 tools, in particular. It sketches a project that aims to integrate informal and formal learning opportunities by extending contemporary learning content players with facilities to include and share informal learning content, ratings and recommendations.

Dissertations

Frequent readers of our journal may have noticed that we have introduced a new category in the community section: Dissertations. Here we present abstracts of PhD dissertations that address e-learning problems. Dissertations that have been published online, are directly linked on the abstract page. We welcome submissions of dissertation abstracts and references to the published work in whatever language. Abstracts in English are, however, preferred.

References

Granovetter, Mark S.: The Strength of Weak Ties. In: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, 1973, issue 6 , pp. 1360-1380

Tönnies, Ferdinand: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1887. (in German, first print 1887, reprint 1935:)

Wellman, Barry: Physical Place and CyberPlace. In: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 25, 2001

Bernd Krämer