‘Emerging Technologies in Distance Education’ ed. by George Veletsianos

Claude AlmansiBy Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

Emerging Technologies in Distance Education, edited by George Veletsianos, has just been published by Athabasca University Press, a Canadian publisher of Open Access, peer-reviewed, scholarly publications. The book, under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada  Creative Commons License, can be bought in print or downloaded (at no cost) as PDF from aupress.ca/index.php/books/120177.

Cover of Emerging Technologies in Distance Education, ed. by George Veletsianos

Thus, this book is doubly important:

  • for its multidisciplinary, multi-author examination and definition of core concepts in technology for education, which have often been used with different, at times diverging, meanings
  • as an illuminating  example of  a scientific Open Access contribution: Open Access and the Creative Commons licenses that can be used to implement it are also sometimes misunderstood.

From George Veletsianos’ Emerging Technologies in Distance Education: Available blog post (2010-07-23), here are the summary and table of content of the book:

Summary

A one-stop knowledge resource, Emerging Technologies in Distance Education showcases the international work of research scholars and innovative distance education practitioners, who use emerging interactive technologies for teaching and learning at a distance. This widely anticipated book harnesses the dispersed knowledge of international experts who highlight pedagogical, organizational, cultural, social, and economic factors that influence the adoption and integration of emerging technologies in distance education. Emerging Technologies in Distance Education provides expert advice on how educators can launch effective and engaging distance education initiatives, in response to technological advancements, changing mindsets, and economic and organizational pressures. The volume goes beyond the hype surrounding Web 2.0 technologies and highlights the important issues that researchers and educators need to consider to enhance educational practice.

Table of Content

[Introduction | George Veletsianos]

PART 1: Foundations of Emerging Technologies in Distance Education

1. A definition of emerging technologies for education | George Veletsianos

2. Theories for Learning with Emerging Technologies | Terry Anderson

3. Imagining multi-roles in Web 2.0 Distance Education | Elizabeth Wellburn & BJ Eib

4. Beyond distance and time constraints: applying social networking tools and Web 2.0 approaches in distance education | Mark J. W. Lee & Catherine McLoughlin

PART 2: Learning Designs for Emerging Technologies

5. “Emerging”: A re-conceptualization of contemporary technology design and integration | The Learning Technologies Collaborative

6. Developing Personal Learning Networks for Open & Social Learning | Alec Couros

7. Creating a Culture of Community in the Online Classroom Using Artistic Pedagogical Technologies | Beth Perry & Margaret Edwards

8. Structured Dialogue Embedded within Emerging Technologies | Yiannis Laouris, Gayle Underwood, Romina Laouri, Aleco Christakis

PART 3: Social, Organizational, & Contextual Factors in Emerging Technologies Implementations

9. Personal Learning Environments | Trey Martindale & Michael Dowdy

10. Open source course management systems in distance education | Andrew Whitworth & Angela Benson

11. Implementing Wikis in higher education institutions: the case of the Open University of Israel | Hagit Meishar-Tal, Yoav Yair and Edna Tal-Elhasid

12. The Use of Web Analytics in the Design and Evaluation of Distance Education | P. Clint Rogers, Mary R. McEwen & SaraJoy Pond

13. New communication options: A renaissance in IP use | Richard Caladine, Trish Andrews, Belinda Tynan, Robyn Smyth, & Deborah Vale

PART 4: Learner-learner, Learner-Content, & Learner-Instructor Interaction & Communication with Emerging Technologies

14. Using Social Media to Create a Place that Supports Communication | Rita Kop

15. Technical, Pedagogical and Cultural Considerations for Language Learning in MUVEs / Charles Xiaoxue Wang, Brendan Calandra & Youngjoo Yi

16. Animated Pedagogical Agents and Immersive Worlds: Two Worlds Colliding / Bob Heller & Mike Procter

From the Introduction

The following excerpt of George Veletsianos’ introduction to Emerging Technologies in Distance Education is copied directly from the book, on the basis of “In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license: Your fair dealing or fair use rights, or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations,” in the book’s Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada  Creative Commons License.

Emerging technologies have been heralded as providing the opportunities and affordances to transform education, learning, and teaching.

Nevertheless, scholarship on the opportunities of emerging technologies in the context of online distance education has been minimal. Most often, researchers, designers, and educators present a description of how such technologies can be used in face-to-face and hybrid courses, but not in distance education courses. Additionally, distance education researchers and practitioners reside in varied academic domains, rendering the sharing and dissemination of their work a formidable task. As a result, the picture of how such technologies are used in distance education is fuzzy. In this book, therefore, we sought to amalgamate work in the use of emerging technologies to conceptualize, design, enhance, and foster distance education.

This edited volume intends to harness international experiences, dispersed knowledge, and multidisciplinary perspectives for use by both members of research communities and innovative distance education practitioners. Notably, contributors from eight countries (Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States) discuss a broad range of issues. Whether training teachers and designers in Canada, promoting the use of wikis within a single institution in Israel, or engaging teachers and students in worldwide climate change dialogue, the thread connecting these chapters is the use of emerging technologies in distance education. (…)

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