As a significant part of what is happening in our course is being mediated through technological spaces and modes that we haven’t yet worked with much on the MSc programme, I thought it might be useful to blog a bit about some of the interesting happenings and challenges we encounter, and put these in the context of the course and its aims.
The most radical departures from previous practice on the programme are:
1) the public-ness of the course for both us as tutors and for the course participants: everything we are doing with the exception of a discussion board space is available on or through this web site.
2) the assessment of a mashed-up aggregation of student work and curation through the lifestream.
In principle we all know that these things are happening, but I suspect that it won’t be until later in the semester that the impact of them is strongly felt – if ‘outsiders’ start to engage with us on the site, and once course participants start editing their lifestreams to be assessed.
But already one new pattern has emerged, which is that essentially we’re mashing up tools and feeds in ways they weren’t necessarily designed for, and there’s no roadmap or exact set of instructions that is going to get us from point A to point B. That’s a bit intimidating, I think – we’re used to knowing the functionality (and problems/quirks) of our VLEs and other environments, and being able to predict what issues are going to arise. Here, everyone is using a slightly different combination of tools and services, wanting slightly different effects from their lifestreams, and it’s requiring creativity and experimentation to make it happen.
The question of whether it’s worth it is one we’ll figure out as we go along. I suspect the answer will be yes at least in one respect – we are learning how to learn with and in the wide, messy web, and testing out some of our beliefs and attitudes towards e-learning by doing things differently.
Anyway, I like an adventure.
Comments (4)
Well, so far I’m having a ball. One minor note: I disconnected the automoatic Twitter > Facebook updates as my friends were wondering if I’d gone stark, staring mad. And people are curious about the public twitter updates – I was at a work conference the last two days and a few people asked what I was talking about. No harm in that, but folks do notice.
Yeah, I decided to create another account to avoid my contacts being baffled by strange tweets. Lots of Twitter clients and browser based tools like Twit IQ let you toggle between accounts. I like the way Jen has set up a feed of all blog posts – just found it today – to get a sense of the longer reflections fellow students are having.
I feel though that it’s a course without a central discussion place (a bit like a living room without a fireplace). Pithy bursts on Twitter, longer isolated passages on the blogs – sometimes with comments, sometimes without – not sure about the boards as I don’t go there that often.
An interesting experiment though …
The very term – mash up – conjures up an image of a chaotic, mix-n-match info stream. The key is to harnass the technology and make it fit for purpose. I see the first week as the ELDC learning community getting to grips with all the social platforms. There’s so many, its easy to get a sense of chaos. However, I wonder how course interaction will look by Week 5-6. Even after Week 1, I feel a bit more comfortable with new environments.
‘mash up’ made me remember how mad I would get when mum mashed potato (good) with swede (evil). This version is much better. I started off confused, but somehow meaning is emerging quite well. I’m even starting to get ok with being partially ignored on Twitter. After all I am partially ignoring everyone else.