Education, Employment and Community Programs MIC 2004 – Costa Mesa, CAAugust 3-6, 2004 Facilitating and Sustaining Diverse Online Learning Communities

MIC 2004 – Costa Mesa, CA August 3-6, 2004

Education, Employment and Community Programs

Facilitating and Sustaining Diverse Online Learning Communities

Presenters:Sarita Nair & Wesley Shumar



What we do…

• Work at the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, economic status, disability, culture, language, geography

• Leverage the power of diversity to improve education and work systems through innovative technology design and use

• Focus on how technology innovation can ensure empowerment, democracy, and social justice in a global society



Panelists

• Kevin Almeroth - Vice Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, UCSB

• Christopher Dede - Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies, Technology in Education program, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Susan Herring - Professor of Information Science & Adjunct Professor of Linguistics, Indiana University

• Nichole Pinkard - Research associate and director of educational technology at the Center for School Improvement at the University of Chicago



Panelists & Participants

• Judy Ridgway - Assistant Director of Instructional Resources, Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education

• John Willinsky - Professor, Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia

• Observer: Anthropologist and ethnographer Dr. Wesley Shumar, of Drexel University

• Audience: 120 registered participants



Framing Questions

• What are the requirements for creating, growing, and sustaining diverse online learning communities?

• Do existing technologies support and enhance online learning equitably across all learner diversities?

• How do existing technologies reflect and reproduce current societal and cultural biases?



Discussion Summary

What are the requirements for creating, growing, and sustaining diverse online learning communities?

• Design decisions involve cultural assumptions and need to be made more transparent

• Success stories can be an important tool for learning about diversity

• There is a lot to learn about motivating participants from the online gaming research community



Discussion Summary

Do existing technologies support and enhance online learningequitably across all learner diversities, including different

races, socioeconomic status, disability, and gender?

• Tools are cultural artifacts and need to be customized to reflect the user population

• Individualization of learning resources is important-not all members of a community are the same

• Technologies need to be flexible and customizable but not overshadow the learning



Discussion Summary

How do existing technologies reflect and reproduce current societal and cultural biases?

• Tools can attempt to address racial and cultural difference among groups but it is harder to address the biases built into the institutional context where they are used

• Research has shown that gendered forms of interaction and conversation persist in online environments even when participants don’t consciously know the gender of individuals with whom they are interacting

• There needs to be more collaboration between designers, teachers and other stakeholders in order to address current biases



Observations

• There were several types of interactions in the dialog– Advice seeking

– Discussion around terminology - learning community vs. community of practice

– Story telling

– Debating issues



Open Questions

• There is much we still don’t know and more research needs to be done.

– How does the culture of the institutional context affect the way technology and digital libraries are used?

– How well do tools address cultural differences?– What is the balance between individualization and cultural

similarity?– Can online learning communities address some of the

institutional impediments to learning for different populations?



Resources

• Gender, Diversities & Technology Institute

– http://www.edc.org/GDI

• Discussion Archive

– http://mailman.edc.org/pipermail/diversityonline/

• Summary document – coming soon!

• Contact:

– [email protected]

Documents

Education, Employment and Community Programs MIC 2004 – Costa Mesa, CAAugust 3-6, 2004 Facilitating and Sustaining Diverse Online Learning Communities