vetpad

Annika Small, CEO of futurelab UK talking at the education.eu seminar “So what’s changed” on the 4th August 2006 suggests that we should be thinking about c-Learning not e-Learning: Connectivity, Community, Creativity, Constructivism and Collaboration. I agree.

Great presentation by James Farmer at education.au exploring how eLearning environments (from Computer labs to threaded discussions and MCQ quizzes to VLEs such as Blackboard) are tending to encourage teachers to perpetuate a transmissive model of education and how we might foster engagement and empowerment in teachers and learners using a blogging environment instead. He refers to the “Community of Inquiry Model” (Rourke et al 2001) that stresses the importance of social, cognitive and teaching presence in any effective learning encounter.

Although I’m not a great fan of traditional lectures as the mainstay of teaching and therefore announcements about university x podcasting its lectures don’t excite me much, I think there is a value in being able to go back and listen again to an event that you were at (and of course listen to an event that you were not able to attend).

I would guess that students who attend lectures that are recorded and made available shortly afterwards may well feel more confident about not having to write everything down and that may encourage less recording and reproduction of information and more thought and perhaps reflection…

The concern lecturers may have about students not turning up to lectures that are recorded may well be unfounded if the experience of Nathan Moss is anything to go by:

It was really good because the [lecture] numbers weren’t going down at all, so they were using them to revise

We will hopefully be finding out more about this as part of the HEA funded IMPALA project that we are a small part of.