MAC Week 4 - Final Publication/Leadership Project

The goal of my Action Research Project was to show how Second Life could be used as a tool to increase motivation, collaboration, engagement, and creativity in online education. My literature review showed how others used Second Life in their research to see just how viable the virtual world could be in education and other aspects of social networking.  Both cycles had students using Second Life as a collaboration and creativity platform for the group work they had to do. Each cycle had two surveys the students had to fill out as well as random interviews done as the main data gathering technique. The data collected showed a high percentage of success in the students using Second Life and the final projects they produced were some of the best I have seen to date.

My two places I will be sending out my presentation to see if I can present at their conferences are listed below:
ASHE, or the Association for the Study of Higher Education, holds a couple conferences a year where educators from all around can come and collaborate on different ways to increase ways to make higher education better.  They also put out a full journal of all that was focused on through research, conferences, and other journals for educators to read and catch up on all the new innovations that might end up showing up in education.  One of the reasons why I chose this is because this would be a good conference to present at and this association has been around for awhile and has gotten a good backing as well as there will be many instructors from all over that do attend the conferences this association hosts.  I may or may not get in, but it would be a good place to present to if able.

EDUCAUSE is the second place that I would be interested in doing a presentation at for one of their conferences. This one deals more in the technology and since my project and presentation is talking about the benefits of the use of Second Life for education, I feel that this would be a good fit for a conference here.  EDUCAUSE is another well known in the education field and would provide me with a way to get my presentation out to other teachers and instructors to show them my research and how they could use it to supplement their own teaching. Ideally, I would love to at least be able to present one time as I am passionate about my topic and I feel that many more would benefit from what I concluded.

 The Publication/Leadership Project summary

As online education became popular, the need to keep students engaged increased greatly as well.  The problem I focused on was how to use Second Life as a tool for collaboration and creativity for students to increase engagement and motivation in online education.  I tackled this problem by first researching others work that they did in Second Life and then did a two-month data collection through the use of two surveys, special work assignments, and random interviews on the participants in Second Life.  The ending data collected showed a 90% success rate in student engagement using Second Life. The conclusion of my research showed that Second Life could indeed be a tool to help engage students in online education.

First Think Out Loud Post

http://krisnewton.blogspot.com/2011/05/mac-week-1-presentation-vs-paper.html


Second Think Out Loud Post

http://krisnewton.blogspot.com/2011/05/extra-post-think-out-loud.html


Link to my Presentation:

Kristopher Newton's Publication/Leadership Project

Presentation Download:

Newton_Kristopher_PubLeadProject.ppt