On-Line Learning and Communication Technologies 05-899 B
Last offered Spring 2009
Instructor: Carolyn Rose
Units: 12
Collaborative technologies featured in the current day social web offer a snapshot vision of the next generation of learning opportunities. Environments such as Second Life, the Knowledge Forum, Wikipedia, and the Virtual Math Teams environment offer a wide range of formal and informal learning opportunities to individuals and groups worldwide. These social web technologies hold the potential to greatly increase opportunities for fostering advancement of underserved populations and leveraging the large amount of out-of-school time that school age kids have for their intellectual and social development. The field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning has as one of its foundational goals to work towards understanding the pedagogical and technological features that make on-line education in general, and collaborative learning in particular, effective.
The purpose of this seminar course is to expose students to the foundational theoretical, technological, and methodological issues underlying previous work in on-line learning, to introduce students to the wide range of current on-line environments for formal and informal interaction and learning on-line, and to explore current research in improving the quality of experiences these environments have to offer. The course is oriented around a hands-on project of the student's own choosing and design that will offer the opportunity to gain experience with available tool kits and work towards making their own contribution to what the modern day web has to offer for on-line learning.
A running theme in this course will be capacity building in university level education in the developing world. We'll discuss a new, in progress distance education project to offer an on-line machine learning course with Carnegie Mellon students together with students at IIT Guwahati, and the design challenge for course projects will be related to that.
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