Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
is to promote microteaching, collaboration and reflective learning. In the teacher
professional learning scenario, all keynote speakers from each professional learning
seminar were videotaped and the videos were put onto the EVA repositories to be
shared with and commented by other professional teachers. The objective is to cul-
tivate professional communities of inquiry and practice based on the knowledge
sharing and evolutionary growth paradigm (dePaula, Fischer, & Ostwald, 2001)
where initial set of EVA videos can be viewed as initial knowledge seeds.
The responses from teachers and students toward the new form of video-based
teaching and learning experience using EVA had been overwhelmingly positive.
The users were excited about potential use of EVA teaching and learning experi-
ence. The users found the ability to interact with the video by constructing and
sharing time-based commentaries very useful and refreshing for collaboration and
reflection. Others perceived EVA activities as an effective process for collective
knowledge construction and generation. All users liked the fact that they could
annotate collaboratively, flexibly, and in real time.
While tools such as EVA are making it really easy to use video materials
as resource for individual and collaborative reflection and knowledge creation in
Higher Education settings, they also have the potential to lead to new forms of col-
laboration that build on new ways to distribute research work between various par-
ties. This is addressed in Pea's notion of a “video collaboratory,” but can go beyond
the small team, involving mass collaboration around video sources, for instance by
tagging. As is demonstrated by sites such as Del.icio.us and Flickr, mass tagging
of artifacts—the emergence of
folksonomies—
can create valuable knowledge based
on loose cooperation amongst the tag contributors, knowledge that can exploited
for information management and research (e.g., Hotho, Jaeschke, Schmitt, &
Stumme, 2006).
Mixed-Method Research: Establishing Trust in Findings
Many researchers in the field of technology-enhanced learning make use of mixed
methods, combining qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative methods play
an important role because technology is a resource, not a causal factor in itself
(Cohen, Raudenbush, & Loewenberg Ball, 2003): the effects of technology, like
other resources, are dependent on its use by people, how they interpret a situation,
and what technology could do for them. In the context of educational use of ICT,
little can be learned about the effects of any technology on the school system with-
out an analysis of teaching and learning processes. Furthermore, since technology is
part of the larger context of a specific teaching/learning situation, it may in princi-
ple be impossible to separate the underlying (agentic or process) causality from the
context (Maxwell, 2004).
There is a strong philosophical basis for agentic causation (for an overview, see
Abell, 2004; Reimann, 2009) so that we do not have to be necessarily worried about
the ontological underpinning of single-case causality. However, the epistemological
