Learning, Teaching and ICT

I contacted someone via email recently to ask for advice about my research. The response is very much valued  – I don’t yet have permission yet to quote the ‘mentor’s’ (?) advice, so I hope that it’s ok to do this anonymously.

My research Question:

Can Weblogs and Wikis and other associated emerging social software tools be used to create an effective on-line learning community? 

Some points to consider here:

•  ’effective’ is quite a problematic term – do we mean effective within the current standards driven climate or is ‘effective’ relating to a different way of working/ learning? 
•  ’learning community’ is defined and understood in different ways, too, so it would be necessary to explore this – perhaps looking to see what kind of community develops rather than trying to mould it to become something specific?

My research Aims:

Aims 1 and 2:

•         To investigate the useful features, and barriers, when using blogs and wikis in a supportive on-line environment
•       To set appropriate tasks and to guide and monitor progress

The advice here is:

• this may be a point of contention – if you are setting tasks to guide progress that could be in contradiction of the underpinning nature of web 2.0 and approaching the project with a viewpoint of learning and teaching. 
•  it is really important to be clear about your own underpinning understandings and assumptions about the nature and purpose of learning and teaching and what the underpinning principles etc are.  
• What is your theoretical framework for the project?

Aim 3

• To evaluate motivation, as well as formal and informal learning

 Advice is:

• How do you propose to go about collecting/ creating data for this project?
• what will you be looking for and analysing in your data?
• Will you be analysing the blog contributions made by the pupils?
• if so what will you look for?  

Lots of thinking taking place …. and some more posts pending  – one step at a time

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Welcome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.