ALTC-LINK – Innovative Education Online Workshop 2009

During June/July I have been presenting and facilitating a workshop on innovative online learning as part of my ALTC Teaching Fellowship project. My thanks to all those involved in helping organise and host the events, at Curtin Uni, RMIT, UTS, QUT, and ADFA; especially thanks to Elaine Tay, colleague and LINK Project Officer. The workshops went particularly well, mainly thanks to the thoughtful contributions of all those involved (the workshop was mostly small-group discussion and presentation). Those who participated will soon receive a collated and developed response, spanning all the workshops so far, which will guide and assist in reflecting on what was learned in the workshop. The presentation component of the workshop is now available at http://netcrit.net/writing

Web 2.0 – What is it good for?

Spending a lot of time recently playing with technologies which might be described as Web 2.0. Trying to get a handle on what can be used for innovative teaching and learning as part of my ALTC project, Learning in Networks of Knowledge. Am thinking that mostly these technologies don’t do a lot we might not already be able to achieve, but that, in some cases, they are incredibly useful. The difficulty is knowing which ones are in which category, without actually trying them out! Also, it seems to me, there are always several different instances of the same basic technology; knowing which one to use is hard; knowing, also, which ones are just ‘upstart-ups’ (start ups ready for buyout and not likely to continue because a big player – Google? – will grab them) can be tricky. Am making progress on a moderately annotated list of these via the Netstudies bookmark collection.