ERIC Number: EJ870422
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Dec
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0952-3987
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
"Developing a Perspective", "Inter-Connecting", and "Bringing It Together": Who Chooses to Use a Labelling Feature in Online Conversations in a Graduate Course?
Bures, Eva Mary; Schmid, Richard F.; Abrami, Philip C.
Educational Media International, v46 n4 p317-334 Dec 2009
This study explores a labelling feature that allows students to tag parts of their online messages. Data comes from four sequentially offered sessions of a graduate education course. Students engaged in two to three online activities in groups of three or four. Students (n = 53) contributed from 0 to 56 labels (M = 12.42, SD = 13.50) and 18 to 114 messages (M = 39.70, SD = 18.04). Groups (n = 17) contributed from 0 to 109 labels, and 57 to 227 messages. Field-notes and descriptive statistics suggested there were seven labelling groups, seven non-labelling groups, and three groups difficult to categorize. None of the individual characteristics hypothesized to predict labelling did. Still, categories of users and non-users emerged from qualitative analyses: strategists, trusters, and techies contrasting with fringe participants, surface coasters, techie-shy, and fluid writers/thinkers/readers. Labelling appeared to be largely a family affair--which group a student belonged to correlated to how much he/she labelled. MANOVA gives for labelling usage F(16, 36) = 2.697, p less than 0.01. (Contains 3 tables and 5 figures.)
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Higher Education, Graduate Students, Education Courses, Individual Characteristics, Computer Mediated Communication, Cooperative Learning, Learning Strategies, Indexing, Classification, Information Retrieval, Predictor Variables, Learner Engagement, Labeling (of Persons), Qualitative Research, Feedback (Response), Statistical Distributions
Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 325 Chestnut Street Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Fax: 215-625-2940; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Canada
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A