Social Software and more…

Yesterday, SCIL’s first online workshop on social software started. It was planned to be taught only through social software but indeed, we now also use a virtual classroom (Breeze) and of course, we still depend on e-mail. The idea behind it is to engage people in little projects where they plan how to use social software in their own teaching. The focus is on wikis, blogs, and podcasts and most participants want to get to know wikis and podcasts but one participant is about to produce his own podcast for his university, and I’m very much looking forward to this.

The course is supported by a blog (where I also do most of my blogging right now). And we also use a wiki which is protected by passwords to make participants feel more comfortable with putting their work online.

Here’s a graphic of how the workshop will proceed (in German):

More information on the course can be found at the SCIL website and at our course blog. Enjoy! 

After my conference in England, I went straight to a project meeting of our European Union Project L2C where we are developing simulations to enhance collaborative skills by learning collaboratively. We’re in the middle of designing the prototypes and our website is online now as well. So if you’re interested check it out.

Today, I read an article in Vision - Looking at the future of learning (issue 03_2006) which is a magazine issued by futurelab, a UK institution dealing with the future of education. Most of the articles seem to be online but I cannot find this particular article.

The article describes how people are now constantly connected through communication and online access. With speckled and mote computing and sensors in our environment this might even become more so.

Thus, people are connected "to a powerful and flexible information infrastructure" which is changing the nature of knowledge and also how to aquire it because we are now facing an almost ubiquitous access to information which has changed and will change the way we learn and work, so that

• information literacy (esp. with regarding to its processing) will become more important
• our learning will become more flexible due to the delivery of learning opportunities in a more seamless way
• computers will disappear from our gaze and be hidden in other devices
• there will be connections aong people in different locations
• new learning methods will be created that better suit the so-called digital natives (with different behavior patterns and necessities)
• the way people learn in developing countries

 But above all, what’s necessary is a cultural change in teaching and curriculum developement. However, there are also critical views that technology will not change anything. The belief that computers could be essential one day is called "a cowardly cheat by technocrats counting on technical innovation to shield themselves from hard questions about what schools should be" (Michael Schrange of the MIT was cited in the article, p. 3).

Lastly, he article suggests that educationalists will have to worry less about technology.

Isn’t that what social software is already about? That this is easy to use for everyone facilitating being connected, communicating, interacting and collaborating.

I’m at the conference in Leicester and it has been great so far. There are about 150 delegates, mainly from the UK. We had five keynotes and three discussion sessions and it was a very fast-paced day. The keynotes were by

• Gilly Salmon who also organized the conference together with her team of the Beyond Distance Research Alliance
• Bob Fryer, National Director of Widening Participation, Department of Health on "How to reconcile Max Weber and Pablo Picasso - competency, creativity and technology in the 21st"
• by Dr. Robin Goodfellow (Institute of Educational Technology, Open University) on "The relation of emerging Web 2.0 internet practices on future developments in teaching and learning
• and by two students of the University of Leicester looking at their fellow students’ views on e-learning