On the afternoon of Friday October 2nd I’ll be giving a short presentation at the FOTE (Future of Technology in Education) conference in London. I’ll be sending out some ideas about social media (particularly blogs and Twitter) and what all of us can do to get more people (colleagues and students alike) building learning networks in which to share their thoughts and ideas.
Please feel free to add your views to the conversation; I’m particularly interested in reading about your experiences of using social media with students and your thoughts on the blending of formal and informal learning. I’m also very keen to hear from those working on the technology side and have a view about how we can make our systems more learner-centric. But all responses to any of the points made in the presentation are more than welcome!
6 responses so far ↓
Looking forward to hearing more about this. I started as a 0.2 Blended Learning Fellow yesterday (http://digital-fingerprint.co.uk/2009/10/blended-learning-fellow-its-official/), and my initial focus will be on the Moodle based Learning Network and on Wimba, 2 software packages which have already been heavily invested in. As I find my feet, I plan to introduce more ’social media’ (or educational media, as some are re-terming it, to overcome the stigma associated with social media), but I’m going to have to be patient… a lot of scepticism!
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lindsayjordan Reply:
October 7th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Hi Bex – thanks for the link to Digital Fingerprint
It’s good to hear that Winchester has gone down the Blended Learning Fellow route – I’m interested to hear what other institutions do in terms of getting their academics involved in L&T enhancement. Hertfordshire have had a system where academics are seconded to the blended learning unit (a CETL) for a year.
You could look at the situation and resign yourself to being patient… but you could equally resign yourself to having to be the most annoying person in the institution for the forseeable future
A book I recently enjoyed was Loss and Change by Peter Marris – a wonderful little gem that helped me to appreciate ‘the conservative impulse’ (probably what you meant by ’scepticism’?) and to see it not just as an infuriating barrier to change but also as an essential element of society and of life itself. However, this didn’t, as you might expect, make me more likely to leave things (and people) be. It actually helped me to understand the conservative impulse and to stop being afraid of it; it helped me to treat conservatism openly and even… affectionately.
Like training dogs, letting even an ounce of fear or frustration into your head will be counterproductive to leading educational change
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[...] final speaker was Lindsay Jordan from the University of Bath, and University of the Arts who had a blog post ready about her talk. [...]
Really interested to hear about your work at FOTE on friday, thought that you pulled together a really nice bunch of sources, thanks!
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lindsayjordan Reply:
October 7th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Hi Peter,
Glad you found it useful – check out my earlier post on Blogging with Students; How and Why (video also on Youtube) for some more info
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Hi Lindsay,
nice to meet you at FOTE last Friday. I enjoyed your presentation and especially how you are using blogs in your own learning and with students. I will point my students to your blog, if you don’t mind, to show them an example of good practice.
Thanks!
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