Podcast interview with Palloff and Pratt on assessing online learners and social presence. I'm listening to it now, so I'm not sure yet how valuable it is. They do talk about the idea of using assessments other than tests and quizzes online, which is good--maybe for M5?

Has stats about teachers' Myers-Briggs results and learning styles

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JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching

Course from Wikieducator on communication and community for online facilitators. Might have some relevant resources for what we're doing.

Intro to wikis, ideas for classroom use, wikis by curriculum area

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Wikis - Teaching Hacks

A wiki example--this time for a 7th & 8th grade class. Just showing another possibility.

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Wikispaces Blog » Blog Archive » A Classroom Wiki Webquest

Sorry to ping you with so many resources today--I'm going through old bookmarks and sharing everything that looks relevant.

This is a reflection about using wikis for global collaboration with 4th graders. Obviously, we're more focused on the higher ed collaboration, but I think many of these "lessons learned" would apply for any age group.

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Reflections on Fourth Grade Collaborations | always learning

Examples of educational wikis

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Wikis in Higher Education (and at UD) - Mathieu Plourde

A possible resource for Module 3, for yourself or possibly to include in the course

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Four Letter Words - How wiki and edit are making the Internet a better teaching tool - Using Wiki in Education -

Chapter in a "wiki book" (2 chapters are free, others require payment for the book). The beginning of this chapter is a basic intro to wikis, but the graphics explaining the workflow are interesting. The author argues that when you work with wikis, you get all the logistic pieces out of the way early in the creative process, leaving more time for actual writing and collaboration. In practice, I think there are times when you have to address the logistics issues throughout the process, but it's greatly reduced with wikis.

• This is a book that you can read the first chapter of

• The above example demonstrates the power of the wiki to make collaboration more inclusive and knowledge construction efficient, distributed and fast. If you think about this visually, the email/Word scenario has limited periods of creativity separated by the logistical and socially sensitive task of combining edits:
  
  
  
  The wiki completely changes this by shifting logistics to the shortest possible segment of time at the outset, leaving a much greater period of time for collaborative creativity and knowledge construction:
  
  

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JALN: Does one size fit all? Exploring Asynchronous learning in a multicultural environment

Small-scale study of cultural differences in an asynchronous learning environment, focusing on high and low context cultures. Includes a comparison of student perceptions of online learning based on their cultural background. High and low context learners both saw advantages to online learning, but their reasons differ.

• Because computer mediated communications is language (specifically, written
  word) dependant, it is subject to the constraints of low/high context
  cultural patterns [46]. As indicated earlier, the
  role of language is to carry meaning, and interpretation is an integral
  part of culture. Language is one means of establishing context among participants
  of a particular culture group. In low context cultures, language must
  be specific and well defined, to provide the contextual definition in
  which to interpret the communication. On the other hand, in a high context
  culture language may be vague, lacking the specificity of the low context
  culture, as the environment within which communication takes place clarifies
  the specific meaning of language [36, 41].
  Thus language plays a key role in the communication process. A key issue
  determining the success of computer mediated communication is the encoding/decoding
  by which that communication is done. Given that computer-mediated communication
  is a textual (electronic) rather than a visual (face-to-face) medium,
  meaning must be carried by the language itself rather than relying on
  the environmental context as the means of communication and/or interpretation.
  Given this relationship, because the language of communication is English,
  low context communication is presumed, thus perhaps disadvantaging those
  whose cultural background relies on high context communication.
• Interestingly,
  low context participants concentrate on the participation environment,
  while high context participants concentrate on their individual work/effort
  and/or skills in the discussion.
• Noticeably
  however, the responses indicate that cultural background directly influences
  the priority of perceived benefits received and challenges posed from
  the same asynchronous communication network. The perceptions are based
  on learning patterns which are developed as part of a participants’
  ethnic/cultural development, and are potentially challenged by participation
  in an asynchronous communication network, which of itself is implicitly
  culturally based. Further, high context participants in an asynchronously
  delivered seminar, while assured of higher quality participation through
  an offline ability to infer meaning through low context communications,
  are at least initially more likely to be disadvantaged by technology differences
  as well as the communications norms implicit in their cultural background.

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An Inclusive Approach to Online Learning Environments: Models and Resources (PDF)

22-page article on designing for diversity in online learning. Examines how cultural differences can affect learning and shares culturally inclusive instructional design models. Table 1 on page 6 compares high-context and low-context learning (such as how formal student-teacher relationships are).

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Designing for Diversity Within Online Learning Environments

The author argues that constructivist learning environments where multiple perspectives are respected and there is no single "right "answer" are better for encouraging diversity. The ideas for instructional design for diversity are more theory-based than practice-based, but this has some interesting concepts.\n\n"The major advantage of this learning model is that one of its key design goals is to encourage students to bring multiple perspectives to questions/cases/problems/issues and projects as part of their learning. This approach to learning views diversity as a strength to be exploited rather than a problem to be solved."