Greetings! My name is Justin Reich, and I am doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Project Manager of the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities Project, a Hewlett Foundation funded initiative studying issues of excellence, equity and analytics in Web 2.0 tools in K-12 settings. I had a great time at the DMLC conference last year, and I'm hoping to see if some other folks might be interested in creating a panel around the use of Web 2.0 tools in K-12 learning environments.
We've started our research by focusing on the use of wikis in K-12 learning environments, trying to answer the questions 1) How do educators and learners create excellent wiki learning environments? and 2) Do only certain students have access to these excellent learning environments?
We've devised a mixed-methods research agenda to address these questions. We've conducted nationwide field research, including nearly 70 teacher interviews, 40 student focus groups, and 19 observations in 14 classrooms in 6 states. We've also applied sophisticated longitudinal modelling methods to samples of wiki usage statistics drawn from nearly 200,000 publicly-viewable, education-related wikis. Our findings allow us to present a national portrait of wiki usage in U.S. K-12 settings, to characterize the ways that learners participate in wiki learning environments, to characterize digital divides in usage across schools serving different populations, and to speak to the tremendous research potential of leveraging Web 2.0 data warehouses to capture real-time data about educator-learning interactions at a global scale.
So that's the sort of thing that I'm interested in! Please contact me at bjr795 AT mail DOT harvard DOT edu if you might be interested in having me join a panel that you are putting together or if you might be interested in helping me create a panel.
Best,
Justin Reich