Teaching Web 2.0

At staff meeting last week, my colleague presented on his trip to the Life Long Learning conference. One of the things he mentioned was teaching students in their own Personal Learning Environments - which, these days, are more likely to be web 2.0 based. Instead of bringing the students round to the University's way of thinking - and using their education platforms - we should be bringing our way of thinking around to the students. This, of course, does not mean that we should be pandering to students and forgetting the traditional educational processes but aim for a syncretic pedagogy.

After the session, I had coffee with a number of my colleagues where we discussed learning web 2.0 applications. From this - and my experience in the Otago Uni DIL project - we need to consider how we approach these applications/strategies. For example, often the thing which stops people from experimenting on-line is that they are afraid they will cause some damage. However, the good thing about using a University system is that there is really very little danger of doing something which will damage the system since it is so protected. Even if you are using your home system the worst you will need to do is format your hard-drive and this shouldn't be a problem since you should back up your data periodically anyway. However, is it enough to just tell those who lack confidence - particularly if they worry they will break the system - that there is very little chance of doing something wrong.

I think we should be teaching the skills that are useful for web 2.0 in general - rather than actual applications. There are some things - such as creating a profile, how to use the help function - that are almost universal across applications. Of course, you need to teach these skills within the context of an application or they will not make any sense...

Various Sundry Titbits

I first wanted to post something that was of the utmost importance and I felt I REALLY needed to post - but do you think I can remember what it is?

I have been working on reading published articles for academics' blogs to help show the Theatre Studies Programme what benefit they could gain for blogging. The benefits mentioned are all pretty obvious: greater collaboration, quicker publishing time, increased exposure, more freedom to mix the personal and professional (one thing I particularly admire). The negative aspects all seem to boil down to one piece of advice: what you write online is viewable by everyone. Pretty common sense really...However, I will be putting up something a wee bit more fulsome here eventually.

Now I remember what I was going to write about: why am I exploring on-line video editors when their off-line counterparts are often much more powerful and just as simple to use (I am thinking here of iMovies which has been designed with those with little or no video editing experience). However, the advantage with an online editor is that you do not have to have a terminal set aside as a video-editing station but students can use any terminal on campus - or indeed off. The good thing about a free service is that there is no further cost outlay to provide software licences.

However, it seems I have hit somewhat of a stumbling block. There are many tools out there designed to share your clips or add social bookmarks but very few for creating your own clips. Is this because the coding is so difficult? Is it too hard to make such tools easy enough to use? I know not...

Dawn and I also had a chat about online photo editors. In particular, we discussed those which claim to improve your photos. Whilst it could be a good idea to use these to improve that pic you snapped spur of the moment there could be some danger in relying on them heavily. This danger comes from diluting the basic skills of photography. I am not saying we shouldn't digitally manipulate images after we take them - this is a common-place and is part of photography. It is just that you can only improve the quality of an image so much; you can never make a bad image good with digital manipulation. Also, these editors are designed for web display. If you are using them for any purpose other than web display they will be effectively useless.

Today was also a first for me. I made my first comment on a colleague's blog. I found the blog of one of the Otago Polytechnic participants who is undertaking a project very similar to mine so could provide her with, I hope, helpful information on where she can locate tools to create an online slide show.

I also have discovered the danger in online tools where you quickly update what you are doing - such as Twitter and Facebook. My boss is my friend on Facebook and saw that I had updated my status somewhat flippantly. You see, I had insinuated that I sometimes do not apply myself fully to the task at hand. This, however, was not my intended meaning. I simply meant to state that I had the energy/motivation to get work done - two things that can begin to fade when you work the 5-9 shift. Just a word of caution: be clear in your communication and you can avoid possibly embarrassing situations. Incidentally, this brings me back to the topic with which I started my blog as this is one of the warnings that constantly cropped up in the readings I was doing for academic blogging...