The European Commission funded Bazaar project was set up to look at the use of Open Source Software and Open Content in education. The project ended in December, 2007. As ever the work of compiling the reports and different outcomes of the project takes a little time after a project. One output is a new report “BAZAAR Project Scenario Papers “. This report is based on a scenario setting exercise and two workshops – one entitled How Dude -where’s my Data and the other on Personal Learning Environments. However the scenario setting exercise went further and included:

• Social Software, Tools and Content Creation
• OERs and the Culture of Sharing
• Interoperability and Metadata
• PLEs, e-Portfolios and Informal Learning
• Open Educational Resources
• Data Integrity and Storage

The report – which is 41 pages long – is attached below.

Here is an excerpt on short term scenarios for social software in education.

“These short term scenarios are a vision of a future that incorporates the use of social software for knowledge sharing, capability development and education and training delivery. They are presented in order to gauge an understanding of ‘how it could be’ if social software was more widely adopted by education practitioners. This future is very close!

Social software will force us to completely re-think our business and delivery models for many activities. It’s already happening in the media and many other industries from telecommunications to music and book-selling. Usage of social software is way beyond how people learn – it is about how organisations see themselves and how they do business.

Integral to the visions of the future is the realisation that the ‘Generation Y’ is a significant part of that future. They are already engaging with social software and making connections and sharing knowledge. The ‘Generation Y’ is a significant driver in the uptake of new technologies, along with business in its quest for efficiency. Organisations and education need to ‘catch up’.

The sense of urgency for change is perhaps being forced by the convergence of the changing nature of working and learning in a knowledge era and responding to the needs of the ‘Generation Y’. This generation are natural multi-taskers (or, at least, very good fast-switchers). They innately use technology to communicate within and outside of their working lives.”

I thoroughly recommend this report for anyone interested in social software, open source, open content and so on….

Download the scenarios report here.

A new guest post from Jenny Hughes on identities.

“Well here I am again in Bremen, squatting on Graham’s blog. He’s abandoned me on a key board while he has gone out for a pizza and, much as I dislike blogging, I dislike pizza even more – always reminds me of a picture of food on a plate.

This is the second time this week I have swapped identities with Graham. I think. On Thursday evening he was invited to a fashion show and disco. Fortunately for all those of you have seen him dance or noticed his taste in clothes, this all took place in Second Life. So there we were, sitting in a bar, laptop, fags and beer at the ready and Graham hands over the keyboard on the grounds that I’m better at talking rubbish and faster at typing drivel than he is.

Now whose identity am I taking over? And come to think of it, who am I? His 2L ID is Graham Lightfoot (in his dreams), a superhero lookalike who for the occasion was dressed in gimpy black leathers with definite shoulder pads (the embarrassment of it!). So I played at being Jenny Hughes being Graham Attwell being Graham Lightfoot for a while then I thought it would be more fun being my own SL identity being Graham Lightfoot being the first life Graham Attwell who was, at that moment, Jenny Hughes. Keep up. I also have another first life identity (for particular writing purposes) and she has a second life ID as well. And I am a virtual student who I teach and she is someone else in SL. Maybe I should have invited them all along, just to see what dialogue my fingers wrote.

Do I have an identity crisis? Well I guess it depends on which one of me you are asking.

So all this gets us into late-night, beer-fuelled conversations about identities – justified as ‘research’ for a forthcoming project on ‘Identities’. Now my job at Pontydysgu is to generate ideas on demand and turn up occasionally for which I get paid in beer. It’s a good system, 1 idea = 1 beer, or, if pushed, 1000 words = 1 beer. (I’m thinking about having a word with my union rep to see if I can get on to a fixed rate of 1 hour = 1 beer.) My starting point when Graham says I want 2 ideas by tomorrow is always to grope around my brain to see if I can recycle anything still alive in there. I think it’s called re-purposing. Unfortunately my brain is a bit like my handbag – filled with all sorts of junk I carry around just in case it comes in useful. And there, like the toffee in the bottom of my handbag-brain, I unearthed a rather squashed memory about Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgical approach”. It took me a while to get pick the fluff off – it was, after all, 1959 when he wrote his blockbuster “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’ and I had read it as a student back in the 60’s.

(Why should novelists have blockbusters and academics have to make do with Seminal Works, I ask??)

One of the things I like about the dramaturgical approach is that it looks at context rather than behaviour. I like the Wikipaedia explanation

“In this sense, dramaturgy is a process which is determined by consensus between individuals. Because of this dependence on consensus to define social situations, the perspective argues that there is no concrete meaning to any interaction that could not be redefined.”

The core of Goffman’s thinking was that a person’s identity is not a stable and independent psychological entity; it is constantly remade as the person interacts with others.

Sweet. And seems to me as good a starting point for looking at identities as any.

Now a great many of you sociologist-types will be very familiar with all his stuff, given that Goffman was one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, but for the rest of you and Graham, here are some sound bites.

Goffman had lots of ‘bits’ in his theory, some bits are more applicable to identities issues than others.

He makes heavy use of metaphors and looks at communication and social interaction as if it was a theatrical performance. He argues that there are 7 elements to a performance. So, in no particular order:

The front or ‘the mask’ is a standardized, generalizable and transferable way for the performer to control the manner in which the audience perceives him. I would say this could be an avatar, a login name or whatever. Just go to the chat rooms to look at some of the more off the wall names, especially when you just know that Hunkybeast and Lionking are 5 foot nothing, scrawny little men who wear string vests.

Mystification refers to the concealment of certain information from the audience and why this is done. So Hunkybeast is often a bit economical with the truth about his wife and 5 kids.

Dramatic realization is the selection of aspects of the performer that he wants the audience to know. For instance, when projects, as a matter of course, set up communication platforms on their web sites I remember being outraged that they even suggested I put up a photograph or told people who my friends were. Even now, I tend to select out more aspects of myself than maybe Graham. Though of course it depends on the context and certainly changes with my identities – on Facebook I’m happy to fill in every quiz going to find out and share with the world ‘What sort of Drunk Am I?’.

Idealization. A performance often presents an idealized view of the situation to avoid confusion (misrepresentation) and strengthen other elements. So the way I write this blog is different from the way I write an academic paper, partly because the style reaffirms it is a blog but also suggests that there is actually a human being behind the performance who is ….(I was going to say warm, funny, witty, interesting, gorgeous but Graham said …..) a small grumpy troll.

Maintenance of expressive control is about the extent to which people stay in character. I am truly ace at this. I have complete on-line alter ego who not only has a complete identity but he or she (giving nothing away) also has an identity in SL, makes spelling mistakes and typos I don’t make, uses a different vocabulary and different sentence construction and different abbreviations (yeah, I was a linguist in a previous life. That’s without the detail of their ‘life’.

Finally, the needs to be a level of belief by those playing the part in the parts they are playing. This may be high or low, total or partial, cynical or authentic etc. I sometimes have a sneaky suspicion that Graham believes he really is a broad shouldered super-hero lookalike in first life as well as second.

Please, all you purists, don’t write and tell me that this is not at all what Goffman meant. I am only borrowing some ideas with a view to a bit of ‘re-purposing.’ There are lots more bits I think are useful in Goffman’s ideas but this blog entry is getting way too long and I’m getting hungry.

In particular I’d like to have look at what he said about ‘stages’ – back stage, front stage and off-stage, about ‘roles’ and about ‘secrets’ and how this connects with stuff I am playing with on learning ‘narrative’ (watch this space). At the moment I’m not sure if I can do anything useful with these ideas but I’d love to know whether anyone else sees any potential in them in providing a framework for exploring ‘identities’.

PS I’ve just counted Goffman’s elements and I’ve only talked about 6 because I can’t remember the seventh. Anyone who can fill the blank?”

I am working with Jenny Hughes on some research for the Mature project. And in the course of developing a few research proposals Jenny asked me what Layered learning is. I had to admit I didn’t know. So it was off to Google. And up came an abstract of a paper by Kumar, Torr and Zisserman which contained the wonderful phrase “efficent, loopy belief propagation.” Wow!. I wish I had written that.

Layered learning seem to have been developed by researchers working to program robots to play football. And basically it refers to breaking down skills and knowledge into a series of hierarchically defined layers. So you might teach a robot to kick the ball and to run. And you might teach them to watch what the other team is doing and to be aware of where their own team robots are and so on. And at the end of the the day you synthesis the different layers of learning to develop a football playing robot. Jenny questions whether people learn in this way. Of course sometimes we do synthesize chunks of learning to carry out a task. But just as often we may analyse a whole chunk of learning to derive the different skills and knowledge from it. In that way we can distinguish analytic learning from synthetic learning. And layered learning appears to focus solely on the synthetic learning process.

Be glad to hear from anyone who knows more than me about this.

This is a question which has bothered me for some time as I am involved in developmental projects for both e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments. And it could well be that there is little difference, depending on how both applications (or better put, learnng processes) are defined. Of course, if e-Portfolios are seen primarily as a vehicle for assessment then the differences are clear. Simililarly if the e-Portfolio is owned by an institution or course. But if the e-Portfolio is seen as being owned by the learner, is intended to record all learning and is seen as a tool for formative self evaluation and for reflection then the differnces become more fuzzy.

I have had a number of interesting discussions about this issue recently – with Jenny Hughes, Cristina Costa and Mark van Harmelen. Jenny (who loves working with words) talked about the difference between presenting knowledge and representing knowledge. I think this is a valuable distinction. An e-Portfolo is a` place for reflection, for  recognising learning and presneting that learning. A PLE may be seen as a tool (or set of tools) for not only presenting learning  but for also (individually or collectively) developing a representation of wider knowledge sets (ontologies?).

Of course it could be possible to develop a tool set which supports both tasks. But there are different sets of tools involved in those different prcesses and in the interests of si8mplicity and usability it may be better to develop environments which allow flexible access to such different tools or tool sets for different purposes.

Why am i wrestling with such obscure ideas? Pontydysgu is a partner in the EU funded Mature project. Part of our tasks is to research the ‘state of the art’ on these issues and to develop and test PLEs as a process for developing and sharing knowledge. Its going to be interesting.

OK – age is telling. I had not heard about LAN partes until last week when Jenny Hughes filled me in on the latest craze. And I love it. For the uninitiated a LAN party is a sort of wireless enabled weekend sleepover / house party.

The party hosted by her son, Owen, who occasionally features on the podcasts went something like this.

Friday evening the guests assemble. Each brings games / computers / gadgets plus a box of electronic bits and pieces. They have a central aim for the party – to build a computer for a friend who does not have one. They meet and plan the build – which bits to use etc. But first they have to boost the wireless signal to reach the attic. Then they form into teams for playing various on-line / offline games and work out a points scoring systems for the different teams. And then it is go – games playing / building the computer / coding and so on. And of course, an endless supply of pizzas and stubbies (for our non native English readers – a stubby is a small bottle of weak beer). Sunday evening – the computer is working and loaded up with software and parents arrive to take the kids home.

Sound fantastic to me. I am planning a Pontydysgu LAN party in June. Want to come? Just email me.

I’m back on the road this week.

Tomorrow I head off to Karlsruhe for the launch of a new research project called Mature. “MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge-maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves tasks & processes or semantic structures. The goal of MATURE is to understand this maturing process better, based on empirical studies, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers.”

I will be working on how Perosnal Learning Environments can be used as part of the knowledge maturing process. Could be a lot of fun.

And on Friday I head off to Pesero in Italy. On Saturday I will be running a workshop on social software, PLEs and e-Portfolios. The workshop is the last day of a five day course on Open and Distance Learning. There are five tutors on the course. We had a skype meeting to discuss what platforms we would use and as might be expected we all had different ideas. The first two days of the course are to be run using Dokeos. I had a try at setting up materials in this system. There is nothing wrong with Dokeos. I is a perfectly respectable Open Source Learning management System. But I just can’t get along with such systems. I guess I just find it too difficult to think in LMS structures. So, along with Cristina Costa, who is also teaching on the course, I set up a PBwiki, I was much happer with this. It is quick and flexible. And Cristina has extended it to include several Pageflakes mash-up pages.

I like this and will use the wiki for support material for presentations and workshops in the future. I will also use the wiki as part of the workshop for recording processes and outcomes. Everything is licensed under Creative Commons. So, if you want to reuse materials please feel free.

I guess I won’t have so much time for blogging this week. But I will try to post a couple of progress reports from the road.

I like this challenge passed on from Steve Wheeler. Steve says looks a little like a chain letter. It might look like it but it isn’t and it probably is (see my comment after this post). It is a creative way to use trackback to promote reflection and at the same time to produce a useful set of Open Educational resources. That is what social software should be for. What is more it is fun.

Steve blogs “Mike Hasley, of TechWarrior Blog, has laid down a challenge for me and 4 others to add to a collection of photos that represent our passion in teaching/learning. I have to tag it ‘Meme: Passion Quilt’ and post it on a blog, Flickr, FaceBook or some other social networking tool with a brief commentary of why it is a passion for me.”

I have cheated. I have managed to break to break or lose three digital cameras this year. And I am not that good at taking photos. On the other hand, my friend, Jenny Hughes is very good. Ages ago, I asked her if I could post the photos on the site. I put them on Flickr and then forgot to link to them. So, thanks Steve for reminding me.And the brief commentary. Does it need one? Learning technology is important. But it is not everything. To be able to learn children need peace, freedom from war, freedom from hunger. Bread not bombs. Teachers not soldiers. I love the potential that technology offers for communication, for sharing, for connections and understanding. But technology is not neutral. Technology is a double edged sword. In the hands of the wrong it can be misused. We have to control and shape technology to ensure that it is used for good and not evil.

End of rant. I think Easter is getting to me.

If you would like to see the rest of this collection by Jenny go the the Multimedia / Photos page.

Here are my nominations to add to this collection: Wolfgang Greller, Cristina Costa, Fabio Giglietto, Daniela Reimann

YouTube is becoming a great resource for tecahing and learning. Over the next few months I’m going to feature some of my favourites in this spot. This video was made by bjnesbitt who says “This project was created to inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.”

This story is all over the net and I can’t resist wading in.

From Wikinews: “South Australian primary school teacher Al Upton was ordered to shut down an educational blogging initiative last week following a directive from the South Australian Department of Education. Al Upton is internationally recognised for his educational blogging efforts over the past 5 years, but his recent project known as The Minilegends has attracted concerns from parents generally relating to interactions between children and adults online..”

This case raises big issues and it is good that the educational technology community has reacted so strongly.

What is notable about the Minilegends project was the care Al had gone to in tecahing students about not only internet safety but how to develop their own digital identity and presence and the issues around that. He had also informed parents in advance about the aims of the project and had obtained parental permission for the children to take part.

The reasons for the close down notice appear to revolve around two issues and both warrant further discussion. The first is that the children used real photos of themselves rather than avatars. Al’s view is that students benefit from seeing their own images. If students – of whatever age – are going to develop an authentic on-line presence then pictures play a big part in this. And pictures are a representation of ourselves. Witness the many ridiculous photographs people use on Facebook or the student prank videos on YouTube. Are these a real image of who they are? What pictures we choose to use is a message we are saying about ourselves. Is it possible to set an age when it is safe ot use a real photograph to represent ourselves? Clearly not. The key issue is that developing and managing our digital identity is seen as pat of learning in just the same way as developing other social skills. Of course this raises issues about safety. But so does just about any other learning activity. Sue Waters links to a Review of the February/March issue of the journal American Psychologist and titled, “Online ‘Predators’ and Their Victims: Myths, Realities and Implications for Prevention. Definitely worth a read, she says, because it highlights many of the concerns are myths and that “there is no doubt that Internet predators are real, and do pose a threat. But the real danger is the public’s deeply flawed understanding of the problem.”
The second issue is the use of adult mentors to support students. I really don’t know what to say. We have daily interactions between adults and children. What seems to be sparking the panic here is because the interaction is on-line. There is a real danger to saying that whilst children can talk with adults face to face they cannot do so digitally.

If one good thing comes out of this it may be that we will get an open debate about the use of the internet for communication and learning. How have we got to the absurd situation that Bebo, Facebook and the burgeoning Disney sites are seen as OK for kids, whilst a well thought through educational project is closed down?

A lot of projects seem to involve case studies. Sometimes I think it is just an excuse because educational researchers do not know how to do anything else. But done well, case studies can produce a lot of useful knowledge. Being interested personally in pedagogy and changing pedagogies, I get a little frustrated at how case studies so often fail to capture pedagogic processes. We find out everything else – except for about teaching and learning processes.

As part of a project called b-learning aiming at the development of a handbook for practitioners in designing blended learning programmes, I have to undertake a couple of case studies and I am doing my best to focus on teachi9ng and learning processes. In the last issue of Sounds of the Bazaar I featured an interview with Helen Keegan who has re-designed and implemented a new course module called ‘Advanced Multimedia’ as part of the University of Salford’s BSc (Hons) degree in Professional Sound and Video Technology.

The podcast was a (very) edited version of a forty minute interview. I have now re-edited the interview to provide a text transcript as part of the case study. I think there is much of interest in this interview – especially about approaches to using Web 2.0 tools and sites for teaching and learning. Many, many thanks to Helen Keegan for all her time.
Question: Can you tell me about the new course you have set up?
Anwer: The students are final year students on a professional sounds and video degree. The module is called advanced multi-media.
I have noticed with these students or students like these that they all have MySpace sites and do great work in terms of the audio and video they have produced. However, scrolling down their sites you see really inappropriate comments from their friends. I was thinking about this because you read that so many employers today Google potential applicants. Few of the students had any real awareness of how they are presenting themselves on the internet.

They were all well versed in the use of different applications and they all knew how to produce and download – albeit illegal – audio and video but after talking to them they had little real knowledge of what happens in between being a producer and a consumer. They are all theoretically going to be producers in the video and audio industries. These industries are changing dramatic ally because of new technologies and I thought these issues were something important to tackle.
Question: So there is a gap between their knowledge as producers and as consumers and a gap between knowledge their theoretical knowledge of being a producer and their occupational practice?
Answer: Yes and they do not understand about blogging and how that can be important in getting an authentic voice and for distributing your work
Question: Is there also a gap in their knowledge between the formal theoretical computing side and about web 2.0?
Answer: They are all on MySpace and they listen to music on my space but they were not thinking about how this could work for them and about things like the long tail, the democratisation of the internet, the read-write web – these were things that they need to know.
It is about having a deep understanding about things going on. Naturally teaching people computer applications is quite instructivist and once you have learnt a few applications it is easy to learn more – we had already done applications. The need now is for the students to become professional. As final year students I wanted to get them really clued up as to what is going on out there in the net and how that will impact on them as video and audio professionals. They needed to learn about things like content mash ups and copyright and licensing and Creative Commons. They all go and look at YouTube and download things but they do not really engage with how they am going to feel as a professional if someone downloads my work.
Question: So that gave you the idea of the module you wanted to develop. You developed an overall philosophy and outline of content. What was the next step?
Answer: Then I had to develop the structure of the course. The first half of the module was largely based on individual work and the second half on group work. The first half focused on web 1.0 and web 2.0 and the idea of the digital self. The digital self is similar to the idea of an e-portfolio but there are some important semantic differences.
The main aim of the first half of the course was professionalisation. This included looking at the students’ on line presence and supporting them in designing their own web sites, web site headers, and business cards. The first two weeks was focused on design principles and the process of design. We then moved on to blogging using a wordpress platform and then delved quite deeply into the presentation of the self in a digital environment, digital identities and – on a practical level – what happens when you Google yourself.
The students learnt that maintaining a blog and putting some pictures on their Flicker account provides them with an authoritative and positive professional identity through their web presence. Moreover this identity will be included in the first few pages of a Google search
Question: What learning materials did you use?
Answer: Many of the learning materials were case studies from the news that week. We also used the students own on-line presence. In the following part of the programme we looked at digital CV production. At the end of this process each student had developed a matching CV, web site, and a web based showcase on MySpace. We also looked at YouTube and examined the technical side of on-line video production. Despite them being final year video and audio students they had not covered technical production for such an environment. YouTube is not a traditional broadcast media. However, YouTube is extremely important for anyone wishing to work in the music and video industry. It is the major outlet for new music video releases today.
The final part of the first half of the course focused on developing and using content mash ups. We used real life examples from the internet to discuss issues like copyright, content licensing and re-use.
Question: What sort of assignments did you set for the students to do?
Answer: The first assignment was to write a reflective critique of an article called ‘The new web’. For the second assignment I gave them two articles about web 2.0 in the broadcast industries, one pro Web 2.0 and the other anti, and then I gave them a Guardian editorial which was talking about the deal which have been struck between Last FM and Sony BG to distribute the content. Basically I gave them a very pro and very anti stance and something which was showing how things could come together in the middle. I asked them to blog about the articles. It was interesting because the first time I asked them to blog the first question they came back with was ‘how do we write it’, the they went on to ask ‘what style do we use’, ‘is it a report or is it an essay’? My reply was that there was no set format – is was their voice and they should relish this – you do not get many opportunities to write from the heart unless you are doing an English literature degree or something like that and certainly not in the sciences. I was really impressed by the standard of their work and really impressed by how they expressed themselves when they were given the freedom to do it.
In the second half of the module we moved over to group work. Although I had developed the framework or the structure of the module in place, when it came to the groupwork it was very leaner centred.
In the first week of the module I asked the students to fill in a detailed questionnaire on who they were, what were their prior experiences in audio and video, what did they want to do in the future with the internet, how might they use Web 2.0 technologies, and what mobile devices did they use. I got a really good picture of the directions they wanted to go in and this was used to inform the second half of the module. The students split into groups and they worked on research projects using wikis for collaborative research and we also did some podcasting and developed rss feeds.
The group work on wikis was very successful. I set a word limit of 3500 words for their group reports on the wiki. This is a very low word count for final year students but I wanted them to think about it as a wiki and not repeat what people have said before but rather use external hyperlinks. I wanted them to experience the web 2 ethos by not just regurgitating what is already out there but bringing it in and developing their own angle on it.
Question: What platforms did you use?
Answer: I adopted a platform neutral approach for the whole module – we would use one platform in class for demonstrations but they were really free to use what they wanted. They seemed to appreciate having that level of autonomy. One of the groups decided to do their work directly in wikipedia.
The last couple of weeks of the module were spent looking at video conferencing, both the technical side in general and the netiquett involved. Rather than the traditional presentation of their projects through Powerpoint we got them to do a web conference. At first they were uncomfortable with this but they warmed to it quickly. In the final week they were split across different rooms with a radio mike and an amplifier and they broadcast across to the other rooms. The students ran this session themselves and asked questions to the different groups. In this way they learnt from each other’s research projects and I think they definitely learnt much more than they would have done if they had just watched powerpoint presentations.
Question: What would be your initial evaluation of the module?
Answer: First I have to say I have only run the module with one group and it is a very early stage in the course development. But the results have been absolutely fantastic – we had an evaluation session and focus groups afterwards and the feedback has been very good. I even had three students contact me for information over Christmas after the course had finished. The students don’t want to stop; they are carrying on developing their web sites and their blogs despite not being assessed. One of the students is releasing an album. He is working on the album at the moment and he is using his site in a real web 2.0 sense to get people to give their opinions on the tracks and on the mix. He has built a community going around his album on the wordpress platform and again, he wasn’t asked to do that.
I think the success of the course is down to loosening control, giving the students autonomy, not dictating what platforms they should use, adopting a very user centred approach and involving them in defining their own curriculum. It is very interesting, taking away the control and watching how people flourish.
Question: This is blended learning but perhaps not in the traditional sense. The design of blended learning has often been based on instructional design based sequencing material, choosing the materials and checking the mix is right. To what extent did you follow an instructional design process?
Answer: I followed the instructional design process in terms of designing the framework but not in terms of what goes in the framework. Before I could do that I needed to know my students and that was a big part of the first half of the course.
Question: How did you decide on the structure of activities?
Answer: One of the structuring factors was the time slot – we met between 9 and 11 on a Monday morning. Bearing in mind that about half of this group are DJs or they work in studios, they tend to go to bed rather late. Nine on a Monday mounding is not a good time for them. I made a rule for myself – which I didn’t tell the students – called my twenty minute rule. I would not do anything for more than twenty minutes. I used a lot of Youtube videos– one or two a session – just to break things up and liven things up. We would start with a Youtube video and then go into a discussion. In depth discussions developed without the students even realising it. It was a mixed up, mashed up approach.
Question: So your blended approach is mico blending – it is a learning mash up?
Answer: Yes, totally.
Question: Obviously this approach was very successful with this group but you have been using web 2.0 technologies to teach people about web 2.0. How much of what you have done is transferable to other subjects or topics which might not be about web 2.0 or even about media?.
Answer: I think there are elements which could be transferable across many subjects. I am currently redesigning our entrepreneurial management workshops for a cohorts of about 160 students and I am taking a very web 2.0 approach. I am thinking about how we can use YouTube. I have remodelled the modules so each week I have one or two trigger videos which are on YouTube. One advantage is that the students can watch the videos when they wish. I am also asking the students to watch the related videos and critically appraise them. Not only are they critically appraising entrepreneurial theories but they are learning about digital literacy. There are very good materials on sites like YouTube but there is also a great deal of rubbish. The key is to get students thinking and talking about the materials and evaluating them themselves..
Question: What to teachers need to learn in order to be able to use Web 2.0 for teaching
Answer: The main thing about teaching teachers to use web 2.0 is contextualising things, it is about situatedness and authenticity.
Away from the actual content and delivery one of my big passions in terms of teaching and learning is motivation – motivation and emotion. Why are the learners here? Why do they want to learn? If you give your learners a case they are interested in to back up an example and it has appeared in the news in the last few days they perk up immediately. It is as simple as that. Half way though the course the course Radiohead released their latest album and said that it was optional to pay for it – that was brilliant – so using these kinds of examples instead of standing up there talking about the history and the legality of video which is so dry I could bring in something they could relate to> We went on to talk about artists who have been discovered on MySpace – these are all things which strike a chord with them and as a motivator cannot be underestimated
In terms of the disciplinary culture in a science faculty the tradition is mainly positivist so our approach is quite unusual. We are dealing with messy or ambiguous ideas and the students can find it quite hard to think in that way. It has been interesting getting them to think about the grey areas rather than the rights and wrongs and absolutes.