I will be presenting at the EdLab Seminar on Wednesday, January 14 at noon. Please come by the EdLab if you’d like to see me put on a little show.

I recently completed a review on the book, Opening Up Education from the MIT Press. If interested, you can read the review in the Teachers College Record by clicking the link below:

Cocicolo, A. (2008, December). Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (review). Teachers College Record. Retrieved from http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=15458.

I am heading to Orlando next week for the EDUCAUSE 2008 conference. If you’re at the conference, come visit our lighting round/poster session titled:

When MySpace Meets D-Space: Building a Personal/Institutional Repository

I thought I would share this paper I’ve put together on an experimental project that uses speech recognition in the classroom. Enjoy!

Using Speech Recognition Technology in the Classroom: An Experiment in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

ABSTRACT:
This paper will report on a design and development project that aims to enrich face-to-face classroom contexts using the latest developments in information and communications technology. The Meety project, when used by students in a classroom with laptop computers, captures the verbal utterances of the classroom context and uses it to supply real-time information resources to the students in the classroom. Students have the option of contributing to the information resources and rating the utility of the resources supplied. This project discusses the design and development of the project as well as a simulated trial to test its efficacy.

I captured my presentation to the CCTE Colloquium, available below:

I will be presenting September 25 at the CCTE Colloquium. For more information on the project, please visit the Colloquium page.

I thought I would post one of the papers I have been working on:

Cocciolo, A. (2008). Participatory Culture, Web 2.0, and Communities of Practice: A Design-Based Research Investigation.

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this thesis is to explore the relationship amongst participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006), Web 2.0 technologies, and communities of practice. Specifically, this study will address the following questions: what are the effects of introducing a Web 2.0 technology into a pre-existing learning environment, and how can such technologies aid (or inhibit) the emergence of a participatory culture? To address these questions, a design-based research project was undertaken where a Web 2.0 technology was iteratively designed and developed, rolled-out to a graduate school community of 5,000 members, and its impact studied over a one-year period. The study uses a variety of methods to triangulate the impact of this Web 2.0 technology. In particular, the study employs a longitudinal social network analysis, a latent semantic analysis, a cross-comparison analysis, and an ethnographic analysis. Results indicate the Web 2.0 environment provides a forum for community members to play-out the tension between reaffirming pre-existing socio-cultural norms and a desire to break free from such structures. Specifically, the analysis reveals that the Web 2.0 technology allows for new forms of participation that were not possible with earlier ICTs as well as opportunities for radical interaction networks to form. However, the study also indicates how the initial radicalism the Web 2.0 technology allowed for is tempered over-time to better conform to pre-existing socio-cultural norms. In sum, participatory culture is made possible by the innovations in ICTs; however, sustaining the culture must be the undertaking of the community. Implications are made for organizations that may be interested in deploying Web 2.0 technologies to accomplish a variety of goals.

Download .DOC file

My colleagues and I look like we will be quite busy at this year’s AERA here in NYC (March 24-28). Our presentations include:

• Evaluating Educational Multimedia in Web2.0 Environments: The Case of TeacherTube
• Connecting Educational Research with an Audience
• Web Video as a Public Sphere for Educational Researchers
• Teaching the Levees: Creating an Online Resource to Facilitate Democratic Discourse and Civic Engagement
• Effects of the Digital Age on Research Standards and Academic Publishing
• Second Look: A Research Platform for Second Life

My website is now a syndicate for AfterEd.TV, the online channel devoted to all things educational produced by my colleagues at the EdLab @ Teachers College. Each week they produce new and interesting video content. Please checkout their website at AfterEd.TV for more information.