Othering
Hajeen Choi / Dan He / Ömer Arslan / Vanessa Dennen
This research project explores graduate students’ feelings of othering, social presence, sense of belonging, and identity in online learning contexts as well as how such experiences influence their engagement and learning outcomes. The ultimate goal of this study is intended to inform instructional designers and instructors in understanding the needs of their students and creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment that is conducive to learning.
Networked Knowledge Activities
Vanessa Dennen / Dan He / Dawn Adolfso
This research project aims to investigate the networked knowledge activities that individuals employ for their educational and professional development on social media. This allows us to learn more about which activities, such as share, collect, curate, broker, negotiate, construct, and network, people consider parallel in their overall purpose and which are conceptually distinct.
Publication
Dennen, V. P., Word, K., Adolfson, D., Arechavaleta, V., He, D., Hsu, C.-W., Hur, J., Jung, D., Heather, K., Russell, A., & Toth, K. (2020). Using the networked knowledge activities framework to examine learning on social networking sites. In Proceedings of the international conference on Web-based Communities and Social Media (pp. 165-172).
Publication
Dennen, V. P., Word, K., Adolfson, D., Arechavaleta, V., He, D., Hsu, C.-W., Hur, J., Jung, D., Heather, K., Russell, A., & Toth, K. (2020). Using the networked knowledge activities framework to examine learning on social networking sites. In Proceedings of the international conference on Web-based Communities and Social Media (pp. 165-172).
Educators’ Invisible Labor
Bret Staudt-Willet / Dan He
We conducted a systematic literature review to understand how educators’ invisible labor has been considered and applied in past research from the last decade. We also synthesize the literature to propose a model depicting intersections of invisibility that mask educators’ labor. Our goal is to make educators’ invisible labor visible and promote more equitable acknowledgment and evaluation of educators’ work
Educator’s Professional Development
Dan He / Luke West / Megan Crombie / Vonda Morris
In this project, we interviewed and surveyed teaching professionals working in K-12 and higher education settings, aiming to explore the potential impacts of the pandemic on approaches of their professional development practices and professional learning networks from school years 2019 to 2022
Online World Map
Vanessa Denne / Dan He / Kari Word
In this research study, we investigate how college students visualize their online worlds in terms of the social media platforms they use, the people they interact with online, the purposes of their social media engagement, and the spaces they visit and belong to for various goals. Our aim is to explore the participant-generated digital artifacts method, which can contribute to social media research by facilitating data collection in a less intrusive manner with participants.
GRADUATE TEACHING ASSISTANTS
Dan He / Jaesung Hur / Jiabei Xu
We are currently conducting a systematic literature review to investigate the following: what topics have been discussed in GTA research; what are the challenges GTAs experience and have been reported; and what training programs are available to GTAs. The ultimate goal is to identify whether there are any unmet needs of GTAs and provide practical implications to support them.