With the many ways that my senior comp research has been going I’ve been given the opportunity to look at many different research articles pertaining to literature on blogs, podcasts, and the many different subcategories that go into using them in the classroom. I have solidified the fact that I’d like to study CMC in the forms of blogs and podcasts to determine the effects that it has on student recall of information. The details of this have not yet been solidified but as I was looking further into the research and exploring the different methods I could use, I decided it might be pretty cool to make the design
2 x 2 mixed and include gender as a second variable. This is all still up in the air; however, with the background provided by Caspi, Chaujut, and Saporta it seems like it could be something interesting to look at.
Caspi, Chaujut, and Saporta focused their study on the gender differences that occur when comparing face-to-face discussions with online discussion board discussions. A little background information allows us to know that their study was completed at Open University of Israel (distance learning school). Students were given the option of participating in a course meeting face-to-face along with their online course or simply meeting online. The results showed that men spoke more readily in face-to-face settings and woman spoke up more often in the online discussions. The researches explored two different possibilities as to why this may have happened. The first is that perhaps woman preferred writing more than men. The second is that perhaps woman simply prefer written opposed to spoken. These results allow a good basis for hypothesis that will be used in my study.
This study focused on the participation of each group in the medium and it would be my suspicion that their participation was accounted for how comfortable they felt within each medium, especially in the sense of presenting their educational stand point through this medium. This study does not in any sense match exactly what I am looking forward to studying; however, it does give me some ideas to brainstorm with about what each sex may feel more comfortable with. It could be the difference between spoken or written. This idea will come in very helpful when planning the design of my future study.
Rather than making a study face-to-face versus computer-mediated communications like this study does, I really like the idea of just using the different modes of CMC. Based off of this study though, I picked two ccompletely different modes of CMC: blogging and podcasting. Blogging is more of a written CMC and podcasting seems to be more of an oral CMC. These differences are similar to the ideas used in this study with face-to-face being more oral and their mode of CMC being more written.
There are a lot of great ideas that I was able to distinguish through this study. For further information on this study it can be searched by:
Caspi, A., Chajut, E., & Saporta, K. (2008). Participation in class and in online discussions: Gender differences. Computers & Education, 50(3), 718-724.