Blog Conversations Research Articles

Teacher collaborative inquiry in the context of literacy education: examining the effects on teacher self-efficacy, instructional and assessment practices

This case study research reports on elementary (grade 8) and secondary school (grade 9) teachers’ participation in job-embedded, professional learning and engagement in collaborative inquiry. Teachers constructed an inquiry-oriented media literacy unit following the collaborative inquiry model. The current study sought to investigate how collaborative inquiry influenced their self-efficacy in literacy instruction, instructional and assessment practices. Qualitative data sources included researchers’ anecdotal notes, teacher interviews, and professional learning blog conversations. Inductive analyses of the data generated six major themes comprising enhancements to teachers’ literacy instructional and assessment practices, which were evident in their adoption of the backward-design model, use of success criteria, and greater emphasis on diagnostic and formative assessment. With respect to teachers’ self-efficacy, data analyses also revealed increased levels of intrinsic motivation, professional satisfaction, and reflective practice. This study provides evidence for the transformative potential and characteristics of school-based teacher collaborative inquiry and the resultant impacts on teacher learning.

Blogging Identity: How L2 Learners Express Themselves

This study discusses language learning and identity, particularly pertaining to intermediate-advanced-level Japanese-language learners, focusing on their target language and identity expression through their interactions with peers and Japanese college students. When learners of Japanese express their identities while interacting with others in their target language, they feel a gap between the self-image they want to present, and the image they are capable of presenting in Japanese (Siegal, 1994, 1995, 1996). Along with adjusting their L1 and L2 usage depending on their interlocutor (Kurata 2007), learners also use different sentence-ending styles depending on the role they want to assume (Cook 2008). By conducting a case study, the present inquiry attempts to address how learners of Japanese express their identities through blog conversations, focusing on their language choice and expressions. Results suggest that participants use the formal endings for self-presentation and projection of their student and classmate identity. However, when expressing emotion some students preferred informal endings, or sentence-final particles.

ConVis: A Visual Text Analytic System for Exploring Blog Conversations

AbstractToday it is quite common for people to exchange hundreds of comments in online conversations (e.g., blogs). Often, it can be very difficult to analyze and gain insights from such long conversations. To address this problem, we present a visual text analytic system that tightly integrates interactive visualization with novel text mining and summarization techniques to fulfill information needs of users in exploring conversations. At first, we perform a user requirement analysis for the domain of blog conversations to derive a set of design principles. Following these principles, we present an interface that visualizes a combination of various metadata and textual analysis results, supporting the user to interactively explore the blog conversations. We conclude with an informal user evaluation, which provides anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of our system and directions for further design.

The Polarizing Effect of Incivility in the Political Blog Commentsphere

As more and more Americans replace traditional news sources with new media news sources, there is reasonable concern regarding the effects. One common concern is the potential for increased political polarization. Scholars worry primarily about media consumers’ tendency to read likeminded partisan views on-line. Ultimately, a diet of one-sided information and perspective likely causes many to become more extreme and certain in their views. To combat these normative ill-effects, it is recommended that individuals read Internet news (or other new media content) from across the political spectrum. While an intuitive solution to problems associated with Internet “echo chambers,” cross-cutting exposure in a new media context may also cause readers to polarize based on their partisan or ideological predispositions. Motivated reasoning theory suggests that, in a hyper-partisan environment, exposure to oppositional viewpoints will not persuade and may even lead to boomerang effects. In addition, theories related to social identity and emotion suggest that the seemingly ubiquitous incivility associated with political blogs and other news sites on the Web has even greater potential to polarize readers. To examine these claims, I draw on data from an experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to read civil or uncivil (or both) partisan content from political blogs. The topic of the blog conversations represented in the study is the federal sequester, a topic that has spurred much partisan vitriol. Overall, the data suggest that much blog content polarizes readers along partisan and ideological lines and that uncivil comments are especially able to do so.

Topic Segmentation and Labeling in Asynchronous Conversations

Topic segmentation and labeling is often considered a prerequisite for higher-level conversation analysis and has been shown to be useful in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. We present two new corpora of email and blog conversations annotated with topics, and evaluate annotator reliability for the segmentation and labeling tasks in these asynchronous conversations. We propose a complete computational framework for topic segmentation and labeling in asynchronous conversations. Our approach extends state-of-the-art methods by considering a fine-grained structure of an asynchronous conversation, along with other conversational features by applying recent graph-based methods for NLP. For topic segmentation, we propose two novel unsupervised models that exploit the fine-grained conversational structure, and a novel graph-theoretic supervised model that combines lexical, conversational and topic features. For topic labeling, we propose two novel (unsupervised) random walk models that respectively capture conversation specific clues from two different sources: the leading sentences and the fine-grained conversational structure. Empirical evaluation shows that the segmentation and the labeling performed by our best models beat the state-of-the-art, and are highly correlated with human annotations.

305 Reflections: Remade, Reworked, Reimagined: Sally Brown talks about place

For quite a long time it has been claimed that cultural production in Tasmania has an inimitable and idiosyncratic place within the scheme of things. Sally Brown, a young Tasmanian designer, maker, artist, is unlikely to make this kind of claim for her work. Nonetheless, there is a particular sensibility evident in her work that it is doubtful that one might find anywhere other than in Tasmania – or made by someone of an older generation. This paper attempts to unpick, through four reflections upon Sally’s work, some of the thinking to do with the placedness, the vernacular social paradigm, the subliminal politics, the ‘crafting’ and the cultural savvy that gives Sally Brown’s work its presence. The questions that hang in the air around a collection of Sally Brown’s work are those to do with the ways local cultural imperatives might shape and make places they are found in, and in what ways might places shape the cultural realities that inhabit them. The following reflections on Sally’s work are distilled from email and blog conversations.

Using Blogs to Identify Misconceptions in a Large Undergraduate Nutrition Course

We describe two iterations of the design, development, implementation and evaluation of small online activity and reflection blogging groups into a large undergraduate lecture course in nutrition. Our goal was to promote student learning and conceptual change through reflection and interaction in blog conversations. We found the blog conversations to be highly useful to the instructors as a source of data on student understandings and misconceptions of course topics. These misconceptions could then be addressed with further instruction. We found that, even with initial training, graduate teaching assistants needed significant guidance in facilitation strategies and that finding the ideal balance between structure and autonomy is a design challenge.

To blog or not to blog: Student perceptions of blog effectiveness for learning in a college-level course

Blogs have the potential to increase reflection, sense of community and collaboration in undergraduate classrooms. Studies of their effectiveness are still limited. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the use of blogs in a large lecture class would enhance students' perceived learning. Students in an undergraduate nutrition course were required to engage in blog conversations over the course of the semester to promote reflective learning. Sixty-seven undergraduates responded to a survey with dimensions on perceived learning and sense of community. Sense of community and computer expertise were identified as significant predictors of perceived learning, when controlled for age, gender, and previous blogging experience. While a majority of the students reported that blogging enhanced their learning and led them to think about course concepts outside the classroom, fewer perceived value in peer comments. Implications for integrating blogging into undergraduate classrooms are discussed.

Weblogs as Personal Narratives

Weblogs as Personal Narratives