Social Informatics is not the most profiled course within the Computer Science or Information Science studies in Norway. It seems to me that it`s not only students that consider social issues of computing boring and unimportant, but that many lecturers also view Social Informatics as a nuisance.
For those lecturers who understand the importance of social issues of computing, there are three things to consider:
Didactics
Didactics
Didactics
Engage your students, grab their harts and minds, and you may throw the text books away and enjoy Social Informatics together with your students.
For those who missed the 6th National Conference on sexual abuse of children in digital media, it is now possible to view all the contributions on our Tv Web.
For those of you out there who does not understand Norwegian, the conference had one presentation in English: “Educational Consequences of Media Development”, by Beata Godejord, PhD. This contribution takes a critical look at some of the negative aspects of the Media world of our kids, and what Teacher Education can do about it.
The Internet is filled with resources one should know about, especially if you are in the field of distance education. For a nice and comprehensive list of Web 20 applications, take a look at my good friend Tom Erik Holteng`s blog.
Some links I have come across today is VSide, a 3D world calling itself the Facebook of Virtual Worlds. For those already exploring Second Life, this might be a place worth checking out. Worlds in Motion wants to build an Online World Atlas, and that might be useful for those of us who want to keep track of the various virtual worlds and online multiplayer games on the Net. For those who want an overview of Distance Education resources, the Distance-Educator.com is the place to start. Also check out the BlogTalk Radio and the eLearning Technology Talk.
The ability to identify people online is an old topic, and within the field of preventing sexual abuse of kids in digital media it`s quite important. One group of Social Informatics students at Nesna University College showed the participants of the 6th National Getting Involved conference how easy it is to create false Norwegian National Identification Numbers, and thus create an online fake identity that are trusted both by those who operate online services and the users of these services.
Thomas Bogevold, Jonas Tindvik Furu, with Camilla Falch in the background,
at the 6th National Getting Involved Conference, 16th of April 2008.Topic: ID on Internet.
Another way of identifying people is the concept of OpenID.
OpenID is described as “an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity.” (Source: ifacethoughts)
As a Social Informatics this is a fascinating concept, not the least because it begs the question; Does a set of URL`s constitute a real and true ID or just a collection of carefully prepared “data” to build a false ID?
Take a look at the OpenID service called ClaimID. How would YOUR OpenID look like?
Welcome to day 2 of the 6th Getting Involved Conference!
The opening of the second day of the conference is at Wednesday the 16th of April, 09:15 hour, and the last of that day`s speakers will appear at 14:45. For those of you out there who does not understand Norwegian, we have one presentation in English and that is at 11:15 - 12:00; “Educational Consequences of Media Development”, by Beata Godejord, PhD.
Follow the live feed of the conference at the conference WebTV page.
Is today´s teacher education up to speed on the world of our kids? Is it able to give teacher education students the knowledge necessary to link Piaget, Vygotsky and different pedagogical theories to the media reality of our children?
If not, how can we expect teachers to help prevent abuse, sexual and otherwise, of children in digital media?
This and other highly fascinating questions and expert advice will be brought before you on this year´s Getting Involved conference. And for those who cannot appear at the conference center in Mo i Rana, a live feed of the conference will be placed at the conference WebTV page.
The feed will be stored as part of our ongoing documentation of our work against sexual abuse of children in digital media.
Since the fall of 2002, Department of Computer Science, Nesna University College, has been working with a project called “Getting involved”. The project was a part of the undergraduate course in Computer Science, and the course Social Informatics. The main focus of the project is to try to fight the constant sexual abuse of children on the Internet with information and awareness projects directed both towards the computer students of Nesna University College and towards the local computer industry and local primary, secondary and upper secondary level schools.
I guess most readers of this blog is familiar with the term “Second Life“, and some of you have perhaps already made your own avatar and started exploring or actively using this virtual online world. I for my part have been participating in online communities, on a more or less regular basis, since 1995. But they were all text based worlds, with an interface that was purely green letters on black screen. In 2001 I had a look at Active Worlds and explored it a bit in my teaching of Social Informatics, but I never fully used it as a platform for teaching or interacting with my students. I briefly explored Second Life last year, but was mostly interested in it as a possible tool in the hands of sexual abusers of children.
After having taken part in this year NVU-conference in Trondheim, I was greatly inspired by the efforts of Bergen University College, Norway, Molde University College, Norway and University of Kalmar, Sweden to use Second Life as a tool for teaching. So last week I registered myself once more and built a new avatar. My students in Social Informatics will take a look on Second Life both as a place
for human interaction, and as a place for putting the idea of a Norwegian Police station into practice.
There are many questions that arise after a visit to Second Life. For instance; visiting different worlds quickly makes it plain that there are not many Africans, Hispanics, Indians or other races represented with avatars. The avatars are either white Caucasians or fantasy figures. What does this tell us of who the majority of the users are? Another question is how to utilize this world effectively as a tool for teaching and learning. How can we use SL to present our topics and motivate our students?
The conference will be held in the conference area of Meyergården Hotel, Mo i Rana, and there is no conference fee.
Since the fall of 2002, Department of Computer Science, Nesna University College, has been working with a project called “Getting involved”. The project was a part of the undergraduate course in Computer Science, and the course Social Informatics. The main focus of the project was to try to fight the constant sexual abuse of children on the Internet with information and awareness projects directed both towards the computer students of Nesna University College and towards the local computer industry and local primary, secondary and upper secondary level schools. A secondary focus was to get the students more involved in the various topics contained in Social Informatics, by using case study teaching. Our hope was that using case study teaching would liberate the students from their preconceived notion that Social Informatics was tedious and not practicable.
As a part of this project, the Department of Computer Science at Nesna University College, hosted on the 24th of September 2003 a small conference with speakers from the police, lawyers, Save the Children Norway, Telenor, University of Umeå and our third year Bachelor students. The title of the conference was “Internet - a hiding ground for paedophiles?”
For more information about the backdrop of our 6th National Getting Involved Conference, take a look at my Poster Presentation from the ITiCSE 2006, and this web page from Save The Children Norway.
In Social Informatics, ethics (i.e. codes of behavior) plays an important role. At Nesna University College we use the theme of sexual abuse of children in digital media in order to explain ethics. But there is also another interesting angle we might take, both as lecturers in Higher Education, as teachers in lower and upper secondary schools, or as instructors training soldiers in code of conduct and ROE.
This is a message to all Social Informatics out there!
The Rob Kling Center, at Indiana University Bloomington is trying to connect people working within the field of Social Informatics. If you are not on their People Worldwide list, then put your name forward, and join the community of Social Informatics. If you have a blog or a wiki, then let them now of your work and have it listed on their Social Networking page.
Under this heading the Department of Media Pedagogy, University of Wroclaw, hosted an international conference,dealing with various forms of communications both in the real world and in the virtual world.
Beata and I presented the result of the work done by our students in the academic year of 2006/2007, concerning communication in Chat rooms. The presentation was well recieved.
The audience, mainly Polish and German reaserchers, was very interested both in the theme of sexual abuse of children in digital media and the use of project based teaching as a tool for creating a higher level of awarness in both Computer Science and Teacher Education students.
Prof. Bassam Aouil, Prof. Dr. Hab. Miroslawa Wawrzak-Chodaczek and me. Prof. Aouil works, among other things, in the field of sexuality and young people. Dr. Hab. Wawrzak-Chodaczek was the administrator of the conference, and has many years of experience in the field of Media.
In an increasingly globalized world, we should strive to make Computer education more global, with global ethical themes that are recognizable and relevant both nationally and internationally. The ethical implications of the widespread use of Internet might be both enormous and to some extent still unknown.
To fight sexual abuse of children in digital media using project based teaching in relevant fields of education, is just such an example of a global ethical theme. And it is a theme that exemplifies one of the challenges as for ethical issues in the information age. In some cultures erotically pictures of pre-teen kids are allowed (Web sites containing Teen models, - USA), while in others it is considered to fall within the law of child pornography (Any picture placing a minor in a situation that could be interpreted as sexual, - Norway). In such instances whose laws and values should apply?
The theme of sexual abuse of children on the Internet is a theme that contains many of the important questions we as users of Information Technology are faced with. Is any picture of a naked, or half naked, kid on the Internet an abusive picture? Is all contacts between grown ups and kids on Chat a potential abusive situation, and if so should it lead to immediately surveillance of the grown up? Are individual rights to privacy an obstacle to the protection of kids online?
Project Getting Involved is now an integrated part of computer science education at Nesna University College, and the fight against sexual abuse of children and the use of ICT to distribute this kind of criminal content has been elected as the main ethical profile of the College. We hope that this project will be a tool in our teaching of Computer Ethics that to some extent will help our students to identify and analyze some policy vacuums and perhaps even find solutions that might resolve them.
In April 2007 the European Commission launched a public consultation concerning how to proceed with the work on making Internet a safe place for children. People could download the questionnaire, answer it and send it to the Commission by e-mail.One question was : “Which should be the means of fighting the production and distribution of illegal content, in particular child sexual abuse material, and what stakeholders should take initiatives (industry, governments, NGOs, financial institutions etc.)? Please suggest ways in which the different stakeholders can contribute in fighting against production and online distribution of illegal content.”
Dr. Beata Godejord (formerly Dziedzic) and I answered as follows: “In our opinion the most important means are the use of various projects and tools that might create awareness of the problem of sexual abuse of children in digital media. This can be done by all stakeholders, and one example is the Norwegian Child Sexual Abuse Anti Distribution Filter. When an Internet user types an address in his/her browser or clicks a link to an URL that is in the filter, the ISP redirects the browser to a specific page instead of the desired address – the so called “stop-page”. This contains information about what kind of content the user tried to access, links to Norwegian legislation and contact information for the police. Other means are awareness projects directed by Higher Education Institutions, where the aim is to give Computer- and Teacher Education students, parents, and teachers in various levels of the national educational system knowledge about the field of sexual abuse of children, so as to rise their awareness and enable them to pass this knowledge and awareness along both other students, professionals and parents, and to the rest of our society. One example of such a project is „Project Getting Involved“, that is implemented in the computer science and teacher education at Nesna University College, Norway and in the Media and Information Technologies education at the University of Zielona Gora, Poland”
The group of students working with age verification discovered something interesting in connection with a service that used social security numbers to verify age; What happens if you take the formula that constitutes the basis for the Norwegian Social Security Number system and then create a fake number? Another of our student groups discovered that some kids where particular as for not placing any personal information in their Internet Profiles, but in the same profiles they happily linked to their separate home pages. Can you guess what sort of information those web pages contained?
The views and results from the work made by the Computer Science students of Nesna University College, together with a selection of reports on kids and chat from MA students from the Department of Media and Information Technologies, UZG and students from our distance education course “ICT and Learning 1”, will be available in the booklet “Kids and Internet – A Polish-Norwegian look at the digital world of our kids” later this year (1).
__________________________________________
(1) Edited by: Beata Dziedzic, PhD, and Per A. Godejord, SL,
and printed in theNesna University College Booklet Series
There are two ways (at least) to use Learning Management Systems and Web 2.0 applications/services. It can be a replacement for face to face teaching, or it can be a part of the overall teaching. Here at the Department of Computer Science (HiNe), blogs, Moodle, Slideshare, YouTube and Facebook are used in what is known as blended learning. These tools are used both in our distance education courses, and as a part of our face to face teaching in computer science. The important part in this use is the individual lecturers own ideas and knowledge of how to teach his/her courses, and it has to be “how to teach” that is the main focus when such tools are chosen. Another focus-point is what sort of tools and environments in cyberspace our students use. If our students use Facebook, then we also have to look into how to use this environment in our teaching.
For Social Informatics such environments as Facebook are of particular interest; - How do people of various ages utilize this tool? And what about privacy and security? These are only some of the questions a lecturer in Social Informatics can ask, together with his students, and using Facebook both as a lecture room and theme of study.
This rather simple video, made with a mobile camera and uploaded to YouTube, is a part of the ongoing experiments conducted at the Department of Computer Science, Nesna University College. Using wikis, YouTube, Flash, mp3, web pages, and LMS is a part of the never ending work of helping our students to learn better. And yet another tool that I`m going to look into is Virtual Worlds.
There are several different virtual worlds out there on the Net, but the most popular is Second Life. This virtual world also have its own world for teens, so this is yet another ICT tool that you teachers have to check out. An older world is the Active Worlds, who are less demanding to the individual computer and therefore is easier to use in distance education, as it is by no means certain that your students have the latest in computer equipment. For my part I am going to use Active Worlds as a meeting place for chatting with my distance education students.
In this blog I have discussed the use of videos as a tool in our teaching here at the Department of Computer Science, Nesna University College. I have used different software and uploaded videos to our own server, either as pure video files or as flash files. But you do not need fancy software to make small lecture videos. Just a webcam and a free account at YouTube.
The video in the previous post was done by using YouTube`s service for recording videos directly from your desktop camera. To post a video to your blog, you may either use the html code that YouTube present to you for embedding the video into a web page, or - as its done in WordPress- place the url in [ ] brackets as described in the “upload a video” instructions on your “Dashboard”.
4. Jakub Spiewak
Founder of the KidProtect.pl Foundation:
“Safety of children on the Internet, educational actions taken by KidProtect.pl Foundation“
5. Police Commissioner Mariusz Olejniczak
Head of the Section for Prevention, Municipality Police Station in Zielona Gora:
“Legal issues related to sexual offence on the Internet“
6. Agnieszka Konieczna
Master Student of the Department of Media and Information Technologies, UZG:
“Safe Internet - Presentation of research outcome from Nobody`s Children Foundation“
Under the supervision of Professor Dr. hab. Marek Furmanek, the department are now working with the final details of “Kids Digital World“, a seminar with speakers from both educational and police authorities, and from private sector.
The seminar program will be available in english shortly.
The last decade has seen a rapid development and growth in the use of computer-based communication and information sharing. Internet or “the Net” as it’s sometimes called, has proven to be perhaps the most popular mass communication medium in the world. As with the phone and the television most of the society has readily adopted the technology, and its spread internationally and its penetration into almost every corner of the educational system and family life, as well as work, is often described as a “revolution”. As one of the first countries outside the United States to be connected to the ARPANET, Norway has quickly developed its use of Internet from a purely researchers tool to being second on the list of European countries where Internet is used daily by its population. Children and young people, in particular, have readily embraced the new communication medium and they utilize it in quite a number of ways.
The Internet gives everyone the opportunity to be anonymous. You may be of any race, sex or conviction and create your own “world”. No one can see you and this “invisibility” is just what makes the Internet a useful arena for grownups who wants to engage children in sexual activities.
Sexual abuse might not only be the grooming of a child, leading on to sexual activities, but also the distributing of what is normally called “child pornography”. The term is somewhat inadequate as this has nothing to do with pornography, but is pictures, films or sound depicting criminal offense. The term “abusive material” has therefore replaced the old term in reports and lectures done by the Police, Save the Children Norway and other institutions working within the field of sexual abuse of children in digital media in Norway. Once a photo of a child being sexually abused is placed on the Internet it will exist in “cyberspace” forever. It is therefore also important to educate both grownups and young people that for every curious click on such material, the abuse continues.
(Shortexcerpt from my “Expert Commentary” that is to appear in the edited collection “Childhood Sexual Abuse: Issues and Challenges”, by Nova Science Publishers. Accepted for publication on the 30th of March, 2007. )
Today Nesna University College announced that it will install the Norwegian Child Sexual Abuse Anti Distribution Filter on its DNS-server. This is a continuing of the work started at the Department of Computer Science with Project Getting Involved.
The College is so far the only educational institution in Norway to do so.
So what exactly is this NCSA-filter?
Since November 2004 the Norwegian Child Sexual Abuse Anti Distribution Filter (CSAADF) has stopped an average of 15000 daily page views of children being sexually abused. Every day this filter blocks a large number of Norwegians trying to gain access to child abuse material.
When an internet user types an address in his/her browser or clicks a link to an URL that is in the filter, the ISP redirects the browser to a specific page instead of the desired address – the so called “stop-page”. This contains information about what kind of content the user tried to access, links to Norwegian legislation and contact information for the police. Norwegian police chose to display a page with information about the filter instead of a 404-error, because they want the public to know that the police have evaluated the site in question, and found it to be illegal to distribute. This, they hope, sends a signal that the police have the technical ability to limit the distribution of child abuse material, and hopefully lower demand and thus prevent future abuse of children.
The Swedish and Danish national police have also adopted the filter. The Scandinavian police forces on a national level share all the information about illegal sites, and check them according to local legislation.(1)
Teaching online is by no means a simple task, and requires both a lot of time and patience. In theory anyone who voluntarily engages him/herself in higher education is by definition motivated, but unfortunately that`s not always the case. One may of course just shrug ones shoulders and say that it`s not the lecturers problem if the student doesn’t want to make an effort to learn. Personally I prefer to try and reach as many of my online students as possible.
Here are some web resources with tips on how to do online teaching, that just might save the day both for you and your students:
Since Web 2.0 is all the rage nowadays, I enjoyed re-reading an old classic in the field of Social Informatics - “The Virtual Community” by Howard Rheingold. His work on cooperation and collective action is relevant for everyone who ponders the possibilities and pitfalls of online education and project based learning.
And while we are talking about Virtual Community let us also remember the term “Global Village“, and McLuhan’s thoughts on the importance of awareness of a medium’s cognitive effects. Something one also should have in mind when contemplating Web 2.0 and the “evangelists” cries of tools that “revolutionize” learning.
And last, but not least, we should take a look at Derrick de Kerckhove`s term ”Connected Intelligence“. After all, what Web 2.0 suposedly is all about is connecting people in order to solve tasks and create environments of learning and knowledge.
The northern coastal parts of Norway represent a vast stretch of fjords, mountains and islands, with many small communities. If a person wants to study at a college or a university he or she may have to travel a great distance. This may not be practical if the person has a job and family.
Before the spread of computers and Internet connections to almost every household, such a person may not have been able to get a higher education at all. But today every University and College who has a Distant Education program can offer those not able to engage in a normal educational process, a possibility to get further education.
Nesna University College is placed at the coast of Helgeland, in northern Norway, surrounded by small communities. So Distance Education should be ideal as a tool for spreading education to everyone who wants it.
Traditionally distance education has been viewed as independent and private learning. But with all the tools now present in Cyberspace, “distance education” becomes ”online education“. Online education may still be private, but may also be a group activity, and may involve some of the processes of social interaction, which is present in “face-to-face” teaching.
According to Dr. Linda Harasim, we may state five characteristics for online education:
-Many to many communication
-Place independence
-Time independence
-Text-based communication, and
-Computer mediated interaction.
And then she includes the following:
-Active learning through peer communication, and
-Social process of knowledge building into the overall theory and definition of distance education.
Ethnography: ethnos = people and graphein = writing.
Ethnography should be of interest to anyone curious about ICT and human beings. In the very old days, adventurers and officials traveled the world and made written reports of what they experienced. These stories and reports gave a more or less thorough description of the human social phenomena’s they encountered.
As a Social Informatics I am very curious about how humans use digital technology, also in other fields of science.
Digital Ethnography is the application of information technology to the process of ethnography, and there are some very interesting questions connected to such use of new technology. Does hypertexts and hypermedia give us opportunities for richer and more varied descriptions of those human social phenomena’s? Is it possible to implement the traditional rigorous academic linear argumentation in hypertext? What about Web 2.0?
Take a look at some of the videos Assistant Professor Michael Wesch, from Kansas State University, has made and placed on YouTube. His videos explore mediated culture, seeking to merge the ideas of Media Ecology and Cultural Anthropology, according to his own words. You`ll find them in the category of Digital Ethnography.
Apart from giving us an insight into Digital Ethnography, his videos also shows us how lectures in Distance Education could, and should be done. YouTube, the new classroom in Distance Education?
Both my good friend and colleague Tom Erik Holteng and I have previously talked about simple tools that can be used to create a feeling of interactivity between the student and the teacher. This interactivity is important to stimulate the cognitive processes of the student and together with true projects aimed at stimulating the intrinsic motivation; distance education might indeed be quite successful.
This is not to say that just utilizing different tools for interactivity and having a project-based approach will help you reach all of your students. Online learning requires that the student have dedication, persistence, study skills, and motivation, and is not for everyone. But for those who have the necessary qualities you might help them to better learning by using a set of different tools.
And the good thing about distance education is that you don’t have to wait for your institution to buy expensive and advanced tools. Personally I am a great believer in the principle of K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple Stupid, so take a look at Jane Harts Directory of free e-learning tools.
It`s quite common to talk about project-based learning in class rooms, but few mention that this is also a good method for teaching topics in distance education.
Using project-based learning you may allow a variety of learning styles, and thereby create diversified teaching. This is, as I see it, one of the most important things in distance education. We have to get away from the old thinking, created by laziness and lack of imagination, that using LMS or web pages only containing text in some form or the other, are enough.
Using true projects as tools to help students of distance education learn, is important also for creating intrinsic motivation. The students get a “real” world orientation and their work suddenly gets a value beyond just the demonstrated competence of the student. This is crucial in distance education as we do not meet the students in real life.
If an LMS, like Moodle, is properly utilized it creates a student environment containing positive feedback and allowance for choice. By introducing a true project, like we have been doing here at ICT and Learning 1 and the module IT103, we can encourage the use of higher order thinking skills and learning concepts. After all we want our students to be able to analyze, make synthesis, and evaluate and thereby reach the highest level of Blooms taxonomy.
A project-based approach also facilitates performance-based instructions and helps the students being responsible for their own learning.
In my field students who are not able to take responsibility, analyze and evaluate is not doing any good. Social Informatics is all about being able to draw your own conclusions and make your own evaluation based on several bits and pieces of information.
So in my opinion distance education without a project based approach is almost worthless, at least in my field.
Digital tools are enabling kids to express themselves, to create their own identities, and to personalize the media they use. Their creativity seems limitless and includes such various forms as mp3 lists, online game characters, digital movies, and blogs. Just take a look at YouTube and see how kids place themselves in full view of the whole world, or check web sites like the Norwegian “Deiligst.no” (Delicious. no). Also blogging is all the rage and writing your inner most thoughts online instead of in the old diary book, might seem quite fun.
The problem with blogging is that children reveal more online than parents know, and they do it because they think that blogs are only read by their friends. No one ever told them that everything placed on the Net is visible for everyone. There are also similar problems with YouTube and sites like “Deiligst.no”.
Childrens creativity is something that should be supported, but also directed. But who`s going to do it? The obvious answer is the parents, with the support of teachers. But if they are going to be able to do so, both parents and teachers have to learn how to navigate in the digital media world of our kids.
Research done by MA students from the Department of Media and Information Technology, University of Zielona Gora, indicates that kids prefer chat systems like TalkTalk or MSN instead of web based chat. This is supported by some smaller findings done by my students, and the reason for this according to some of the kids in Norway, is that web based chat is “full of weirdo’s and pedophiles”.
Let`s just hope that those kids that are sceptical to chat sites also are careful with their contact list in MSN.
In distance learning the tools is not the main problem, even if it sometimes might look like it is – with computers breaking down, LMS systems not functioning etc. The main challenge of distance learning today is the learning itself.
A teacher will have to take a student centred approach to teaching, and provide students with opportunities to set some of their own objectives and work toward their own goals. Distance teaching requires a great deal of independent learning. So teachers will have to motivate students and provide them with a framework that facilitates memory and comprehension.The LMS does have the possibility of providing the means of organizing work and discussion groups, and the Internet represents a vast amount of information witch the student actively can use in her studying. But in order to get an active student and an active use of the various computerized tools of distant learning, we have to have teachers who fully understands the principles of active learning AND the use of computerized tools.
If the teacher is just presenting the lessons in the same way an “old-fashioned” teacher would lecture his students, or has no understanding of how to use the computerized tools, then the various Learning Managment Systems will be just another costly waste of time.
My distant education course, IT103 - ICT in Society and Working Life, is finished for this term. Tom Erik Holteng and I both did an electronic survey to see if our use of various tools to make our teaching better, actually worked. Did our use of Podcasting, Power Point Broadcasting and Flash movies provide the students with better learning?
According to the 25 students (of ca. 80) who did the survey, the majority said yes.
And what about my use of sexual abuse of children in digital media as a theme for this course? Did it motivate the students in their work with this course? Again the students responded with an overwhelming yes.
There are several problems in connection with this sort of surveys, but at least it`s an indication that this years experiments was not a failure.
At the 24th of September 2003 our department hosted a small conference with speakers from the police, lawyers, Save the Children Norway, Telenor, University of Umeå and our third year Bachelor students. The title of the conference was “Internet - a hiding ground for paedophiles?” With this conference as a backdrop we hosted two online discussion sessions between our students and the New York based lawyer and author Andrew Vachss.
These two sessions was meant to be an experimental example on how to teach ethical topics to computer students using Moodle as a communication tool, and was a part of our “Project Getting Involved”
Students, like all human beings, are inherently active and curious. The desire to learn something new, to explore and discover, is intrinsic to the nature of us all. Still, those of us who have been working in the field of teaching for a longer period of time have more than once witnessed students who seem to be completely disinterested from day one, or who lose interest during the course.
There are many theories of what motivates people, but in in our work here at Nesna University College with Project Getting Involved the work on intrinsic motivation and self-determination by Deci and Ryan [1985] was central.
Self-determination theory is an approach to human motivation and personality that investigates the basis for people’s self-motivation and personality integration (Ryan & Deci, [2000].
Motivation was also an important factor for Jewett and Kling [1996]: “Our objective, then, is to design a course - select topics, materials, and activities - which will develop the students’ internal motivation toward the course. At the minimum, we want to reach them in a way that will resonate with their own interests. At best, we want each student to have a sense of discovery - to find a new and exciting way of understanding computerization in their personal and professional lives.” Jewett and Kling’s focus on internal and external motivation corresponds with Deci and Ryan’s work on intrinsic motivation and self-determination (Deci & Ryan, [1985]; Ryan & Deci, [2000]).
Many students are naturally enthusiastic about learning, but there are also some that need their instructors to inspire, challenge, and stimulate them. They want to learn, but they also want to feel that learning is meaningful for them and their situation: “Do you, as a teacher, know what meaningful knowledge is? Do you, as a teacher, know what kind of knowledge is important to me as a student? The question is difficult, but if you have no answers, why should I be your student?” (Dale, [1989]).
Unfortunately, there is no single magical answer to these questions, but in my view we are a long way towards an answer if we are able to involve both the hearts and minds of our students.
