Tuesday 29 January 2008

WP6: Web 2.0 and staff development

So far, our main developments have been in the use of synchronous classrooms (WebEx), to deliver staff development on Web 2.0 technologies. Six, 2-hour sessions have focused upon blogs and wikis, social networking and social bookmarking. an evaluation report will follow, alongside a recipe paper on engaging users through synchronous tasks. This also links to a conversation I was having earlier with Derek Harding, at the University of Teesside about producing shopping lists for users. His argument is for microlearning:

"Learning that doesn't take long to do - maybe a few minutes.
For example a small tutorial that covers how to do something in photoshop such as crop. People doing stuff in the community want to get on and do it rather than mess about doing courses so it is just a question of facilitating that.microlearning needs in communities. What I really need I suppose is a process for responding to Explaining this has just given me an idea. What we need is a shopping list page that people can write in to say 'I don't know how to x' and the list can be visible to all like an faq list but newcomers can endorse things on the list by voting for them if they are already there. This would allow the community to set priorities."

We also have a space in Second Life, which a student is scripting. This level 3 Computing Sciences student will be producing guidelines for staff development in virtual worlds.

1 comment:

Steve Mackenzie said...

the microlearning idea is good and i can definitely see the need for this approach. However i think the whole thing should be underpinned and revolve around a learning network, such as a ning network. By channeling learners through the network to access these 'micro' resources the vital aspect of social learning in a community can be fostered in an incidental unplanned way.

being an advocate of social learning i think there is danger that the microlearning approach could be isolating and very me me me and although it will still be useful and beneficial it could be enhanced in a non heavy way from an informal community of learners approach.






with the undestanding that to participate