Grainne Conole from Open University @ Moodlemoot 2011

New Pedagogies for Social and Participatory Media

Conole’s keynote explored open resources for enhancing teaching and learning. How increased use of the extensive open and online tools that are available could enable us to build on each others ideas and research. She promotes the idea of mixing the use of closed institutional tools with open resources.

Open design, delivery, research and evaluation

• Fostering creativity
• Needing new online skills for lecturers and students
• Keeping up with fast changing technology

Sharing tools

• Allows peer critique, creating valued critical info for research.
• Discussions on teaching and learning i.e. OU’s use of Cloudworks ‘a place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences.’ How a quick question can develop into a flash debate see ‘Is Twitter killing Blogs?’.
• The Open Education Resource (OER)  movement was highlighted as an important move forward.
• Conole advocates a mix of closed institutional tools and open options. Personalising our own resources, but shifting from design as individual to one that is sharable.
• Opal Project focus on practices around use of OER, what support, design, guidelines are provided to help teachers.

Diversity of students

• Consider that while many students are digitally aware, some don’t use social media appropriately whilst others may lack the criticality for effective use.

Relating pedagogies of e-learning to online tools- See slideshare for more details

Relationship between the tools and users

• Allowing reflective dialogue, aggregation, interactivity and characteristics and preferences of users should be evolving practices. ‘Learning through play.’
• Developing new forms of creative practice i.e. Twitter technology simple but to use effectively is complex and personal.
• Technologies are not being fully exploited. Predominance of old practices. Why is this happening? – lack of time, resources, skills, support?

The Solution – Open technologically mediated learning

• Sharing of content and research. Making raw data available so others can manipulate it.
• Focus on open practices. Speak to peers to find out what went right or wrong.
• Look at the delivery and use of free tools.
• Encourage reflectivity.
• Use research repositories such as Academia.edu, a semantic wiki for open research.

Favourite Tweets from the keynote

@TechCzech: My take on the importance of community for open research http://t.co/Ewxla8w #mootuk11

@tutor2u_econ: Your top open web resource? I have put a few here http://www.tutor2u.net/learning/presentations/creativeweb/player.html

@TechCzech: http://mattlingard.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/moodlemoot-2011-keynote-via-twitter. Great example of Twitter for keynote notetaking

View Conole’s Moodlemoot Slideshare Presentation here.