Identity presence and knowledge building: Joint emergence in online learning environments?

Abstract

This study examined the presence of identity in diverse online courses and explored how presence of identity correlated with content and students' participation in online discussion and hence knowledge building in online educational spaces. Epistemic and participation data regarding online interaction and knowledge building were collected from a diverse group of students enrolled in seven multi-disciplinary online courses. Both qualitative and quantitative findings of the study suggested that online discussions with identity presence were associated with more follow-up participation and reinforced a more dialogic online interaction. Identity presence was also correlated with online interactions of knowledge sharing and egocentric elaboration.Keywords Identity presence . Online knowledge building . Online discourse analysis Educational practitioners and theorists have long recognized that students' identities -the ways in which they view the world and their perceptions of themselves within the world -play a major part in their learning and construction of knowledge (Brown et al. 1989;Crichton and Kinsel 2003;Wenger 1998). Psychological research suggests that understanding different

Dispelling e-myths and pre-empting disappointment: Exploring incongruities between instructors intentions and reality in asynchronous online discussions

“…Undoubtedly, studies such as these focus on the different dynamics of online interaction, such as cognitive learning, argumentation, and social knowledge the cognitive and metacognitive processes of online participants, and a number of researchers (Ke et al 2011;Chang, Lin and Tsai 2012;Nandi et al 2012) have exploited this model to make sense of their students' online discussions. Although Henri's (1992) model is one of the most frequently cited and employed by CMC analysts, it was not applied in the current study: the model was designed in the context of teacher-centred instruction and it does not take the co-construction of knowledge by the interaction analysis model devised by Gunawardena et al (1997), who and comparing of information to agreement and application of newly generated including Lang (2010), Hou andWu (2011), andYang et al (2013).…”

Breast Health to Blind Woman: Validation of Accessible Online Course

“…Convoluted terms were modified to more colloquial language, which is recommended for both the education of blind people, such as online courses. The text written in a simple and dialogic way encourages the student to understand himself in this process of learning, in which he participates as a subject of knowledge production [9].…”

Knowing My Peers: Edentity – To Invite Peer Interaction and Social Learning

“…A solution is to support the students' effort in establishing a social learning setting and encourage them to interact. But interaction requires knowledge of whom one is interacting with [3]. We argue that a first step towards creating a social learning setting in which interaction is central is that the students reveal cues about their identity to others.…”