FO2010 - Mini conference event: Interview with Dr. Marcia Johnson

I am interested in your comments and insights about the issue of managing student expectations in an online course. While all students bring their individual schema to any course, there is a degree to which, for some reason, students believe that an online environment releases them from participating. This can make it rather difficult for the teacher, and for other participants in the course. But ... what can we do about it?
I have here a voice file of an interview I conducted with my guest speaker, Dr. E Marcia Johnson, Her PhD is in educational technology from the University of Toronto and she has taught applied linguistics in Japan and New Zealand. Her current research includes eLearning across academic disciplines at tertiary level, and technology implementation in language teaching... (and in fact, more than 10 years ago I was one of her students in a paper on Computer Assisted Language Learning... which I thoroughly enjoyed).
In the sound file below Marcia talks about the reasons that students enroll in distance papers, and how the same reasons that they choose to take a net paper can impact on their ability to participate.
I invite you to listen to the sound file and reflect in the comment box on your experiences in this area. Perhaps you have been a student in an online paper, and it proved more difficult to keep up than you anticipated.

Marcia Johnson, BA Toronto, MA (Educational 
Technology, PhD (Ed. Tech) Toronto.
Relaxing in the garden

Maybe you are a teacher in a net paper. Is what Marcia describes familiar to you?
Marcia mentions some mechanisms that she would set in place to address some of these issues.
I am interested in your opinion or insights as to what you do to simulate the participation behaviours that we tacitly expect within a face to face classroom. I'd love to read some of your ideas.
Marcia will also be participating in this discussion, so please feel free to address your comments to her too.


Sound file (5MB) (File may take a little while to load)

Streaming link to the file (takes about a minute to load with medium speed broadband)

or... Download link to the file

Testing... can a sound file work in the blog?

Here is my test sound file. The idea was to work out how to upload a sound file and player into my blog. I'm hoping next week to host here a mini-conference as part of the Facilitating Online 2010 course... with a guest speaker contribution sound file.

So, what I did (according to blogspot instructions) is make myself an OpenDrive account and upload into it my mp3 (which I'd made using Audacity).
Then, in OpenDrive, once I'd uploaded my file, I selected and clicked the little arrow-chevron link to reveal a series of options in a drop-down menu. I chose 'links', which took me to an interface showing a series of URLs for my file, (according to what one intends to do with it). In this case I chose the "html embed" option; copied the stuff in the box and pasted it in here (using the "Edit HTML" view tab) - it worked! (I think... let me know if it's not working for you)
Issues: is it a bit slow to stream?... does it start playing immediately or do you have to wait for the entire file to download?...
I'm going to put a longer file up and then test it from home (where I have a medium speed broadband connection).
My questions about this technology:
Is the idea of using a sound file in the blog appealing?
Is what I had to do to achieve this embedded file too difficult for the average blog user?... (no, but I had to persist a little... now that I know what to do it's a snap, you can do it too).
(Will Blogger develop a wysiwyg interface for uploading sound files similiar to that already available for video do you think?)

Anyway:
Watch this space... a FO2010 discussion about issues with Facilitating Online happening at this location very soon