Engagement Theory: A Framework for Technology-Based Teaching and Learning.

Discusses engagement theory (students meaningfully engaged in learning activities through interaction with others and worthwhile tasks) and the three components, collaboration, project orientation, and authentic focus, and outlines research questions to establish its efficacy.

This was a great article.  I have been taking the advice of the books that I have read as they say that it is important to do a lot of reading of research to narrow down a focus.  I always find myself  gravitating towards the articles that have to do with Technolgy Integration.  For me I really want to help educators use technlogy in a way that is meaningful to the learners, and in a way that will help make thier classrooms run more efficiently. 

How to Select a Dissertation Committee - Questions to Ponder for Doctoral Students

I was thinking that it's about time that I begin speaking with professors about working on my committee.  So read pointers in the Lunenburg book, and found some helpful information on the web also:

 

Choosing a dissertation committee is one of the most important decisions of a doctoral student's doctoral career. Although it may seem like an easy and straight forward task, there are often complications and issues that may arise as a result of dissertation committee choices.

 Early in doctoral studies, try to become involved in research. Finding out about faculty members' interests and research pursuits is a way to ensure that you line yourself up with a committee that not only understands your research interests, but is interested in putting the time into seeing you through your dissertation. Read department bulletins, publications and announcements to find out more about faculty activities. However, while collaborating with faculty is an excellent thing to do and can result in good opportunities for you, do not let this deter you from exploring other options. If you stay focused on one faculty member you could be doing yourself a disservice in the long run.

Be straight forward and honest with potential dissertation committee members-be prepared with a line of research you are interested in exploring so that you can let them know your interests and ask them if this would be of interest to them. Inquire as to potential sabbaticals or other plans they may have which could interfere with your dissertation. Remember, the most important thing about selecting a dissertation committee is that you come first. If you do not watch out for yourself and ensure you are able to complete your dissertation, you cannot expect faculty to do this for you even though they may appear to be looking out for your best interests. They are also looking out for themselves and their careers.

Inquire as to which faculty members are tenured and which are getting ready to go up for tenure. Faculty are typically extremely busy, especially those who are not yet tenured. They are in the process of trying to complete their own research, write articles for publication and make themselves as indispensable to the department as they can. While these faculty members may be more willing to become a dissertation committee member, they may also be busier and less able to put in the time when it comes down to the wire for you completing your dissertation.

While most schools may allow you to have a committee member outside of the department, and in some cases this may be helpful, you also want to be sure that this person is going to be accessible and has the necessary background for you to be able to complete scholarly work. While this person may be eager to assist you and become a member of your dissertation committee, if they are extremely busy or you do not have easy access to them, you may find you spend more time trying to track them down or waiting for them to return work to you. They are also not accountable to the department chair or dean at your school.

 During courses, if you enjoy the professor's style, their feedback on your work and their willingness to work with students, inquire as to whether they are looking for a Teaching or Graduate Assistant, or help with a research project. This is a great way to get to know them better and may turn into a possible research or dissertation opportunity for you.

 Sit in on courses of professors who you may be interested in working with on your dissertation. Observe their teaching style, and most importantly, their interactions with other students. This can tell you a lot about how they may interact with you during the intimate working process of a dissertation. Read their research in published journals, and if possible read their own dissertations. This will give you an idea of their working style, writing style, attention to detail and research methods preferred. You also want to inquire about professor's willingness and ability to do qualitative versus quantitative research. If for example you are planning on doing a qualitative research study for your dissertation, you do not want a dissertation committee member who has never done qualitative research and does not value this type of research.

Get to know the politics of the department. One of the biggest challenges in choosing a dissertation committee is the member's ability to "play well in the sandbox" together. You do not need or want the stress of dealing with faculty conflict during your dissertation. You want your dissertation members to not only respect one another, but to also respect the other members' ability to do research, to teach and to critique work.

The most important person on your dissertation committee is your dissertation chair. This is the person who can make the difference on whether your ride is a smooth or rocky one. They are the person who will be the first to read and critique your work, who will distribute your work when ready to the other committee members and who you will turn to for support and encouragement if you should find your motivation is low. You should be able to trust this person, respect and value their feedback and want to spend some time with them as the dissertation process is not only time consuming, but it can be energy draining. Most importantly, be sure of this person's agenda. Do they really want you to succeed and finish in a timely manner? Are they more interested in their own work or research? This can be especially tricky if your dissertation is using this person's data, or is a spin off on a project they initiated. What is this person's management style? Are they going to micromanage you or are they pretty much hands off and are willing to let you pursue your interests? You may want or need a person who is going to be constantly looking over your shoulder. Only you can truly answer this question. Your work styles should match and your chair should be able to give you the direction and help you need when you need it. Another indication of who to select for your chair especially is their ability and quickness to respond to emails, phone calls and the like. If weeks go by and emails and phone calls are not responded to, this is not the person you want as chair or perhaps even on your committee. This is a reflection of how difficult it will be to get them to read and respond to your work.

 Your dissertation chair may also be able to help you select the rest of your committee. This can be both good and bad. While it may make the selection process easier, if something goes wrong with your chair (such as them leaving the department), the rest of the committee may no longer be as on board with your research, or your chair may be unwilling to work with other faculty who you would like to. Do not allow your chair to dictate who you select or to limit you as to whom you select. While this is the person you want to please the most, you also do not want to be subject to their own personal nuances. In my experience, my chair who ended up not getting tenure and leaving the department, "suggested" who I should select on the committee and let me know who she felt was not appropriate. The result was she became inaccessible once she left the department, and I had committee members I did not necessarily want to work with.

 You want your committee to have strengths in different areas. While it may be easier to have a committee who always work together, they may also not be willing to confront or critique one another's work. You should have one member who is very good at statistics, while another is excellent in editing. While dissertation members do not have to be familiar with every aspect of your research, and depending on the program, you may not have a faculty person who is, they should at least be interested and able to understand materials you present them with, as well as possess the ability to critique the literature and your research methods. You also want your committee to have a balance of being able to be both supportive and critical. While perhaps it would make your life easier, you do not want all the dissertation members to push everything you send them through with few comments, editing or criticisms. This could result in a disaster when you go to defend your dissertation and are unable to answer audience questions or when publishing your work and unable to answer editorial questions.

Finally, the most important person next to the dissertation chair on the dissertation committee is you. You have to spend some time doing self-exploration. What do you think are the most important qualities to have in the dissertation committee members? What do you want the process to be like for you? How much involvement and management do you feel you need and want? How much space, support, guidance, encouragement, freedom or security do you honestly need (and want) from your committee members. What is your timeline? What do you want to do after your dissertation? (this can help guide you as to who to select on your committee for interests). Do you need someone who is going to be able to be there for you to talk to when you have difficulties? How rigorous do you want your dissertation to be? Do you want it to be a scholarly work that contributes something to the field or are you doing this to just do it and get through your program? How much of a self-starter are you and do you need someone on your committee to be able to push you and provide you with deadlines and time management?

 Choosing a dissertation committee is not a process to be taken lightly as it can mean the difference between you graduating when you want to, or much later than expected. It can mean the difference between having numerous headaches as a result of other people's personality, demands and expectations, or having a pleasant and academically rigorous and rewarding dissertation process.

How Do I Find My "Slither" of Research

 

 

Here is a little information about the program that I facilitate at STCC. It was developed by Pearson, and I am still learning about the various components. I work in the Reading lab, and I see that the students who are motivated to finish, do just that. Other students only work on the program when they are in class, and that was not the intention of the program. Most of the work is to done outside the classroom, and tests are the only things that need to be done in class as they are proctored. I am still thinking about the problem or question that I could have, and I think student motivation could be something that I delve deeper into… hummm:

More about MY LABS PLUS:

MyLabsPlus is a dynamic online teaching and learning environment designed to support online instruction programs with rich, engaging customized content. Convenient administrator tools and dedicated administrator support allow departments to grow their programs with confidence.

Jackson State Community College's Mathematics Department Wins Prestigious Bellwether Award Pearson's MyMathLabPlus helps colleges and universities improve student performance, control costs

Using Pearson's MyMathLabPlus, an innovative online homework and tutorial system, Jackson State Community College has achieved a 13 percent improvement in student learning, a 45 percent increase in its student pass rate and a 12 percent increase in retention--all while realizing a cost-per-student savings of more than 20 percent.

MyMathLab, MyMathLabPlus Help Colleges and Universities Control Costs, Increase Student Gains Pearson, University of Alabama Honored for Groundbreaking Use of Technology to Increase Student Achievement

Pearson and the University of Alabama have received top honors from a consortium of the world's leaders in education and learning technology, in recognition of their innovative use of technology to improve math achievement.

Pearson offers colleges and universities even more benefits with MyLabsPlus--an enhanced version of the MyLabs and Mastering programs, featuring more robust administrative and reporting tools and enhanced customer support.

Pearson Announces Plans for Integration of Learning Technologies with Oracle.

Integration expected to enrich students' online learning experience, save institutions time and money

Pearson announced plans to integrate Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Student Administration Integration Pack (SAIP) with a variety of Pearson products, including the Pearson LearningStudio advanced online learning environment and Pearson's MyLabs and Mastering personalized learning solutions. The announcement was made at the 2009 EDUCAUSE annual meeting in Denver, one of the largest gatherings of education technology professionals in the world.

My Labs Plus

I have been giving some thought to what I would do my dissertation on, and I keep coming back to the My Labs plus program that Southwest TN Community College uses for their remedial programs.  They are all online, however the students have to do testing on campus as it has to be proctored.  I am interested in studying it more, but what would be my problem or question?  I know I have time, but it has a way of sneaking up on me….

 

 

The History and Future of AR

The term "augmented reality" has been around since 1990 but that doesn’t mean that it was never there before. The moment that man-made gadgets that could relate to their environment and supply their users with information based on that, AR was there. It’s just that nobody thought to call it that.

 So, for those who want to know how it all went down, here is the history of augmented reality from birth to where we are today.

 Beginnings

From 1957, a gentlemen known by the name of Morton Helig began building a machine called the Sensoria. It was designed as a cinematic experience to take in all your senses and, shaped, rather like arcade machine from the 80s, it blew wind at you, vibrated the seat you sat on, played sounds to your eyes and projected a form of a stereoscopic 3D environment to the front and sides of your head. It was supposed to be impressive with its demo film of a cycle ride through the streets of Brooklyn but it never sold commercially and was very expensive to make films for largely because it involved the camera man having three cameras strapped to him at all times, and while it was really more an adventure in full virtual reality, there are clearly elements of AR involved with both the devices in place between the user and the environment and that fact that the environment itself was, itself, the real world viewed in a real time situation - even if recorded.

In 1966 Professor Ivan Sutherland of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University invented the first model of one of the most important devices used in both AR and VR today - the head-mounted display or HMD. It was a monumental piece of kit that was too heavy for the human head to actually bear and so hung suspended from the ceiling of the lab instead which was how it got its nickname as The Sword of Damocles. Being early in the scale of computer technology, its graphical prowess was fairly limited and provided just simple wireframe models of generated environments. Nonetheless, it was the first step in making AR a usable possibility.

 

AR is born

While it might have been around for a few years in one shape or other, the phrase Augmented Reality is supposed to have been coined by Professor Tom Caudell while working in Boeing’s Computer Services' Adaptive Neural Systems Research and Development project in Seattle. In a search to find an easier way to help the aviation company’s manufacturing and engineering process he began to apply virtual reality technology and eventually came up with some complex software that could overlay the positions of where certain cables in the building process were supposed to go. It means the mechanics didn't have to ask or tries to translate from what they found described in abstract diagrams in manuals.

 

At the same time, in 1992, two other teams were made big steps into this new world. LB Rosenberg creates what’s widely recognized as the first functioning AR system for the US Air Force known as VIRTUAL FIXTURES where fixtures were what he described as cues to help guide the user in their task and did so in very big letters.

 A second group, also fond of capping things up, made up of Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre and Doree Seligmann - all of whom now lead in the field of AR - submitted a paper on a prototpye system they called KARMA (Knowledge-based Augmented Reality for Maintenance Assistance). The team from Columbia Uinversity built an HMD with Logitech-made trackers attached to it and the object they were dealing with - a printer. The project was then to develop 3D graphics of a ghost image to show people how to load and service the machine without having to refer to instructions. The paper went down rather well and was widely cited within the science community.

 And just to prove it’s not all work, work, work, AR hit the arts world in 1994 as Julie Martin (presumably not of Neighbors fame) became the first person to bring the concept into public performance. She created a government-funded show in Australia, sounding rather like a ITV celeb show, called Dancing in Cyberspace where dancers and acrobats interacted with virtual objects projected into the same physical space as themselves. Sadly, we haven’t been able to track down any reviews.

 

The app revolution

 Until 1999, AR remained very much a toy of the scientist. Expensive, bulky equipment and complicated software all meant that the consumer never even knew of this growing field. As far as they were concerned, explorations into virtual worlds had died along with the Lawnmower Man. All that was to change though when Hirokazu Kato of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology released the AR Toolkit to the open source community. For the first time, it allowed video capture tracking of the real world to combine with the interaction of virtual objects and provided a 3D graphics that could be overlaid on any OS platform. Although the smartphone was yet to be invented, it was what allowed a simple, handheld device with a camera and an internet connection to bring AR to the masses. Almost all of the Flash-based AR you see through your web browser will have been possible because of the ARToolKit.

Educational Implications of AR in the Classroom and Training Environments

There are many different ways for people to be educated and trained with regard to specific information and skills they need. These methods include classroom lectures with textbooks, computers, handheld devices, and other electronic appliances. The choice of learning innovation is dependent on an individual’s access to various technologies and the infrastructure environment of a person’s surrounding. In a rapidly changing society where there is a great deal of available information and knowledge, adopting and applying information at the right time and right place is needed to main efficiency in both school and business settings. Augmented Reality (AR) is one technology that dramatically shifts the location and timing of education and training. My research describes Augmented Reality (AR), how it applies to education and training in the k-12 sector and the potential impact on the future of education.

I have narrowed down my focus, and I am finding it difficult to find empirical evidence that supports my thesis.  However, this is a fun process.  I am off to training Thursday to hear how AR can be integrated in to the classroom environment.  There are a lot of educational implications for AR and we are just scratching the surface. 

Narrowing My Focus

I read an article called, Alien Contact!: Exploring teacher implementation of an augmented reality curricular unit.  This paper reports on findings from a five-teacher, exploratory case study, critically observing their implementation of a technology-intensive, augmented reality (AR) mathematics curriculum unit, along with its paper-based control. The unit itself was intended to promote multiple proportional-reasoning strategies with urban, public, middle school students. The researcher used lesson transcripts, observation field notes, and teacher electronic journals, along with pre-/post-interviews and pre-observations to examine differences in implementation between the AR and Control versions of the unit. The author observed less mathematical substance and more adaptations to structure and quality during the AR implementations. In addition to uncovering some significant limitations with AR as it is currently utilized, this study also addresses gaps in the technology literature. Criticism of technology literature includes the fact that it does not consider the effects of teacher and curricular factors on technology-based curricular interventions. By closely examining the implementation of one augmented-reality based, mathematics curriculum, this research provides insights about how and why such curricula become transformed in the classroom.

I am narrowing my focus every day by reading research.  I know that I want to know more about how AR has been implemented in the K-12 classroom, particularly the younger students in lower middle and elementary schools.