e4innovation

In the first week of our course, H809, we asked students to read quite an old paper from 1989 by Hiltz and Meinke ‘Teaching Sociology in a Virtual Classroom’ (Hiltz, S.R. and Meinke, R. (1989) ‘Teaching sociology in a virtual classroom’, Teaching Sociology, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 431–46.). We then asked them to reflect on a series of questions about the paper:

• Questions: What research questions are being addressed?
• Setting: What is the sector and setting? (e.g. school, higher education, training, informal learning)
• Concepts: What theories, concepts and key terms are being used?
• Methods: What methods of data collection and analysis are used? (e.g. the number of participants; the type of technologies; the use of interviews, surveys, observation, etc.)
• Findings: What did this research find out?
• Limitations: What are the limitations of the methods used?
• Ethics: Are there any ethical issues associated with the research?
• Implications: What are the implications (if any) for practice, policy or further research

It’s been fascinating reading the students’ blogs and seeing their different interpretations of the paper - some like it, some don’t and also their reflections on the questions. They have come up with a really rich set of views and perspectives. A number have also reflected on how the paper compares with current research, parallels with work on implementing VLEs for example; others have related the paper to their own practice or research that they are currently doing. It’s so great to see such a vibrant community developing already on the course! I’m going to learn lots reading these blogs over the next 20 weeks!!!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 10:48 am and is filed under Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.