PPEL, UNIT 3, TASK 3

Transparency in Online Education

Writing a review in the forum on one annotated bibliography and one learning object published by colleagues.

Review of Juliana Antunes's AB and LO about Transparency in Online Education

I've reviewed Juliana Antunes's AB. She wrote about 3 articles and 1 PowerPoint:

1) Social networking sites: Transparency in Online Education, Christian Dalsgaard, Institute of Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus, Denmark

Juliana began posing the central question of the article: What is the educational potential of social networking sites?
Then, she described the characteristics of social networks and how they can be used in online education.
At last, she explained how transparency encourages cooperative work and creates awareness among students: transparency allows everyone to view the work, progress and difficulties of each other and to be aware of the activity of other students.
Those are, in fact, the main issues about Transparency in Online Education.
Thus, Juliana correctly interpreted the contents of the article and summed up the essence of it.


2) Visualizing Student Profiles through NKI’s Online Catalogue and Student Network, Morten Paulsen, September, 2009

In this review, Juliana mentioned NKI's philosophy on online learning as a facilitator of individual freedom within a learning community in which online students serve as mutual resources without relying on others.
Then, she refers the flexibility to engage students so they can start whenever they want to, the tool to monitor individual progress of the students, and the continuous enrolment and examination.
Maybe last three paragraphs could be removed, since they are repeated in relation to previous article.


3) Transparency in Cooperative Online Education, Christian Dalsgaard and Morten Paulsen, for International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, June, 2009, viewed May 12, 2010

Once again, Juliana begins her review posing a question: What is the potential for cooperation of social networks in education online?
She answers this question saying that when transparency is applied in distance education, it gives us an overview of the share of each student, giving the example of the NKI Distance Education's model.
She concludes referring that the educational potential of social networking lies on the transparency and the ability to motivate students and social networking sites are not new learning management systems; they are considered as a supplement to other tools.
The review of this article is a little bit confused but it seems to me that these are the main aspects of it.


4) Transparency in online education Key Idea, Rosalina Manuela, January 18, 2010

Here, Juliana should quote the key idea of transparency in online education, referred by Rosalina in her video: "Social technology - such as Twitter, blogs, Facebook - opens the door to sharing the process of learning, not only the final product." (Siemens, 2009)
However, I think she got that key idea.
Once again, maybe last paragraphs should be removed, since they are repeated in relation to previous article.


5) Transparency in Development cooperation? Use Web 2.0

Sorry, Juliana. I didn't find that article, from that link.


Despite these details, I liked Juliana's AB and I sure learnt a lot by reading it and its articles.


I've reviewed also Juliana Antunes's LO, the quiz "Know your transparency's level".

In a simple way, Juliana poses 15 questions that present some of the Transparency in Cooperative Online Education main issues.
It's funny to answer to that quiz and that makes you think about those subjects.
In order to improve this LO, I think that Juliana could have done an introduction to this theory's concepts, with the aim of better contextualize the answers.