A Global Conversation on Effective Technology Integration in Education

This chapter explored the technology perceptions and preparedness of pre-service and in-service teachers from three different countries. Twenty-one students in the Republic of Korea, twelve students in the United Arab Emirates, and thirty students in the United States of America were virtually connected. They participated in weekly online discussion forums for six weeks and shared how well prepared they felt about using technology in their content areas and how they would effectively use technology in their future classrooms. This study can serve as a good model for facilitating a global conversation and supporting a reflective online conversation across geographic distances and cultural barriers.

Multimodal Communication

This chapter includes information about communication patterns and organizational discourse at an online university, which utilizes a mentoring model to educate students. The mentoring approach involves the assignment of individual students to work one-to-one with a faculty mentor for each course of the degree or certificate program in which the student is enrolled. To address the types of communication inherent in this virtual education model, a mentor, a doctoral dissertation committee member, and a student shed light on their experiences of communication at the university. These diverse prospectives serve as a meta-communication model that can be implemented to enhance the effectivness of discourse at other institutions––particularly those seeking to implement a one-to-one mentoring approach.

Science for All through Reflective Interactions

One of the goals of science education is to ensure that the discipline of science is accessible to all individuals. By many organizations this has been termed “Science for All,” and those who promote this idea also advocate the connection to science literacy. Teaching science in the online environment has been one way to offer science content to many different individuals, who do not necessarily need to be in the same location. Discourse in the science classroom is framed under situated cognition theory, whereby interactions between individuals are part of the normal culture of the classroom. For science knowledge to be adequately constructed by a student these interactions must be meaningful ones. This is especially important in an online science course where typically learning occurs through interactions between the students and the instructor, the students with one another, and within the individual themselves. As part of these online interactions, good reflective practice includes the different forms of feedback and the quality of this feedback. However, even with quality reflective interactions, there are barriers to science concept construction in an online environment. These barriers are discussed, and future research directions are suggested based on this review.

Technology Supported Assessment in Distance Education

Distance educators at any stage of their career or dealing with any discipline of knowledge are required to engage into number of tasks like present and construct assessment tools, make valid judgments of the student progress in learning, facilitate the provision of feedback and support the production and delivery of mark/grade to assess their students. Assessing students in distance education is a cumbersome task and technology offers number of possibilities and opportunities for educators to make this task more enjoyable, feasible, meaningful, and reliable. In this backdrop, the present chapter focuses on defining assessment in the context of distance education; discusses about promises and on-going initiatives for using technology to assess students; underlines pitfalls of technology supported assessment in distance education; offers useful strategies for distance educators to use technology for assessment; and predicts the future of technology supported assessment in distance education.

Knowledge Is Infinity, Language is Limit!

But to what extent can it be taught? There are the heteronyms of this problem such as Polanyi’s “tacit knowledge’’ or Hegel’s/Agamben’s Eleusinian Mystery. In Distance Education publications there is a current use of photographical illustrations; Photography itself is also a Distance Education program. Distance Education culture and Photography culture have also same mythological origins like Kairos and Mnemosyne.

Metaphors in Meta-Communication

This chapter is based on the claim that the metaphors as a new and powerful tool in different sciences especially including Information Systems and a number of sociological disciplines such as linguistic, education, and sociology can be used for the implementation and sustainability of the components of meta-communication for distance education. The meta-communication aims to move the intercultural components of metaphors to the distance education and its applications. Thereby, metaphors serve to the basic mission of distance education creating cross-cultural educational environments. In order to use metaphors with the meaning put forward by this claim, restructuring of metaphors with the contemporary metaphor theory, use of metaphors in computer systems and user interfaces, the intersection of metaphors and meta-communication and finally the power of metaphors in digital meta-communication for distance education are discussed below.

Meta Communication Concept and the Role of Mass Media in Knowledge Building Process for Distance Education

This chapter examines and focuses on some issues and questions relating to how the use of meta communication concept should be functional and how it could influence knowledge building process. In addition to this, the role of mass communication and the mass communication tools which can be regarded as vital for distance learning, primarily the Internet, television, printed materials, and the categories by which media tools interact are also investigated. The ways mass media interacts with imply the interaction taking place between communicational tools and human mind are quite similar; that’s why mental building process of knowledge is dealt with likewise. Mind-tool interaction can be categorized into four sections: interaction through reading, interaction through listening, interaction through seeing-listening, and mutual interaction.

An Online Conversation among Southeast Asian Higher Education Institutions and its Observed Oppressions

The study was implemented from Kasetsart University in Bangkok and the UP Open University in Los Baños, with the latter hosting the KM system and administering the online platform. However, it involved a community of practice that came from four countries: Thailand; Philippines; Lao PDR; and Indonesia. It found that the CoP model may indeed be used as capacity development approach for the design of a graduate degree program. Furthermore, Web-based learning management systems such as IVLE and Moodle can adequately serve as meta-communication platforms for such a CoP. However, it was observed that the language barrier, cultural sensitivities of Southeast Asian participants, intellectual intimidation, as well as access and connectivity clearly posed communicative oppressions.

Building a Theoretical Background for Distance Education

This chapter focuses on how to build a dynamic theoretical background of distance education, as a source of meta-communication, and how it affects the use of online learning for reflective meaning making to construct a knowledge society. Based on the main purpose of this study, the virtual world can provide online learners with an interactive milieu for problem solving, critical thinking, and personalized/group discussion, multimedia presentation of global resources, connectivity, and visualization of social aspects of discussion and communication. In this context, distance education can respond to concerns and issues to create digital self-representations through communication theories and learning theories together. Furthermore, discussing the main features of the cross-cultural implications of reflective conversations can construct a very powerful paradigm shift to establish public interests encompassing the reflections of every aspect of social networking with the enthusiasms, persuasions as well as judgments.

Adding Self-Discovery Learning to Live Online Conferences

In recent years, pre-recorded digital poster sessions have become more widely used as parts of real-time face-to-face conferences and as complements to online conferences and colloquiums. The multimedia-enriched building of various types of digital poster sessions offers high potential for conference organizers to be more inclusive of a variety of topics, and it helps conference participants gain more value from the shared synchronous time and virtual experiences. This chapter examines the role of digital poster sessions in contemporary online conferences and highlights some basic production-quality issues in the creation of digital posters.