Welcome to this week's EdTechTalk (ETT) newsletter! It was a great week on EdTechTalk in spite of (or maybe because of) many schools being on Spring Break in the US. This was the week of conversations about building communities of practice particularly in educational settings, and Jennifer Maddrell was the featured personality of the week sharing her doctoral dissertation project and areas of potential exploration on two different shows!

This week, Jennifer Maddrell discusses the focus for her dissertation work: the Community of Inquiry framework: http://communitiesofinquiry.com/. Her primary research question focusses on whether there is a relationship between learner's perceptions of "community" and actual learning outcomes as identified by grades, papers, tests, etc. The discussion took a very practical turn as we sought to identify particular strategies that may be used by instructors to develop community within online courses.

This week, Lisa, Sheila, and Maria were joined by Kristin Hokanson in the chatroom and Alec Couros in the skype call to discuss copyright and fair use, copyleft and cc licensing, and the ethics surrounding it all.

Chat Archive:

Jackie Gerstein shared a wealth of information about her work with students and her approach to teaching. Her video, Digital Writers' Workshop from K12 Online 2009 was streamed. It was a great conversation.

Chat Log

 EdTechWeekly #157
March 14, 2010

In a break from EdTechWeekly tradition, Dave and Jen explored their research projects and interests regarding "community" within an educational setting. If you are looking for the contributed links to news and resources shared by the EdTechTalk "community" this week, please point your browser to our EdTechTalk delicious folder.

Chat Log Below 

Hi everyone

I'm sending an unauthorized newsletter (I'll probably hear it from the newsletter team) to tell you about why edtechtalk has been a little weird lately (that is, in a technical way). We've been compromised by some irritating folks who apparently want us to be more informed about the pornography scene on the internet.

Welcome to this week's EdTechTalk (ETT) newsletter! This has been a fantastic week of outstanding conversations and professional development shared at ETT. If you missed the K12Online Conference Echo webcast on Tuesday you missed a fun time of learning and growing professionally. Special guest presenter was Jackie Gerstein who shared the phenomenal ways she uses technology with her students. You will definitely want to listen to the recording of the session.

This week, we discussed the experience of online learning with two students at The University of Montana. Amanda Armstrong, an undergraduate student taking a fully online degree in Media Arts and Jamie Lockman, a graduate student taking an online political science course. Topics discussed include: