One of the best sessions so far this morning…
It started out with “Students aren’t prepared for Web 2 technology, are they?” – which highlighted that students were having difficulties using wikis etc., not really because of the technology (though they weren’t as familiar as one might have expected), but due to the fact that they weren’t used to group working.
Next was Alan Cann, discussing his Biology students and their ability at statistics (which included many “plankton” as well as a few “Penguins” when it comes to learning stats) We got to see “socky” – his sidekick for videos teaching basics of stats; and, interestingly far more students wanted to download the files, rather than using the RSS feeds. He’d felt that was the need for students to separate personal/entertainment [on ipods etc] and work – on the University PC.
Finally, Iain Wallace looked at the SpokenWord project, which is an archive – mostly of BBC recordings (audio/video) – and a way of searching it for educational purposes. Like Alan, he’d also noted that students just don’t seem to like RSS feeds for educational materials; they’d rather have the option to find the feeds when they want to work.
An excellent final session.
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Tags: ALTC-2007
Hmm I definitely went to the wrong sessions this morning.
Student’s lack of experience and comfort with a range of Web 2.0 technologies has almost been the 5th theme of the conference, and cropped up a lot.
SpokenWord looks like it could be really useful resource. On first look there is relatively little material in my own subject area, but I might need to dig some more.
Other than that, it was really nice to meet up, and look forward to seeing you in Second Life sometime soon!