Connecting Online (CO10): Dr. Norman Friesen Public Class

About the Class

Welcome to CO10 the annual live online conference. The conference will be of interest to educators, administrators, students, and community members who value the importance of integrating technology into the curriculum to improve instruction and learning. Online learning involves various skills on the part of the instructor and learner. These include social and communication skills, social networking, independent learning strategies, critical and higher order thinking skills, creativity, and effective online and face-to-face facilitation.

The Conference will be conducted on IT4ALL Moodle course: http://www.integrating-technology.com/course/view.php?id=89 (enrollment key is CO10 ) and WiZiQ.

Dr. Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Friesen is the author of Re-Thinking E-Learning Research: Foundations, Methods and Practices (Peter Lang, 2009), and is co-editor of the online peer-reviewed journals E-Learning and Phenomenology & Practice. His research interests include the application of qualitative research to e-learning, media literacies and alternative pedagogies. Dr. Friesen is also a member of the Canadian Delegation to ISO/IEC/JTC 1 SC36, which produces international technical standards for e-learning systems..


Title of presentation:
Re-thinking E-learning Research.

Description of presentation:
In the rapidly-changing world of the Internet and the Web, theory and research frequently struggle to catch up to technological, social and economic developments. In education in particular, a proliferation of novel practices, applications and forms—from bulletin boards to Webcasts and from online educational games to open educational resources—have come to be addressed under the rubric of "e-learning." But so far, research in this fledgling field has gravitated towards many of the same methods and philosophical frameworks used to investigate and design earlier and quite different instructional practices and technologies. The challenge remains, then, for research in e-learning to be re-thought, for its foundations and methodological orientations to be reconsidered, in order that it reflect rapidly developing theoretical, social and technical configurations and practices. In this presentation, Dr. Norm Friesen will examine some of the possibilities opened up through a re-thinking of e-learning research, providing specific examples from his book of the same title published in 2009.

Language of instruction: English

Keywords: co10, norman friesen, it4all