#iCollab, communities and networks

Nurturing global collaboration and networked learning in higher education, an article based on our iCollab experiences, has been published in Research in Learning Technology today. The article was authored by Thom Cochrane, Averill Gordon and myself, three members of the iCollab community of practice – it is based on a presentation which Thom and I gave at the 2014 EdTech conference ‘Nurturing global collaboration’.

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In the article, we reflect on our experiences in iCollab, creating a global community of practice of educators and students which intentionally operates within and across networks.

The iCollab lecturers who initiated and facilitate the iCollab CoP share a common understanding of higher education students, in all their diversity. We recognise that students, as networked individuals, enter higher education with existing identities, networks and practices – both digital and embodied. We do not ask students to leave these at the door (or the virtual door, in the case of VLEs). Instead, we invite students to join a community of practice that is itself networked, to reflect on and develop their identities, networks and practices within the iCollab CoP and to the extent that they wish, in wider networks to which the iCollab CoP provides visibility and access.

Thanks to our #icollab colleagues Helen Keegan, Ilona Buchem, Mar Camacho, Bernie Goldbach and Sarah Howard – and to all of the students with whom we have worked – for ongoing inspiration and learning.

A module ends, a networked community continues

My reflections on CT231 at the end of this academic year, and thanks to my students.

CT231

To mark the end of the year of CT231, I’d like to begin by thanking you — all of the students who participated in the module. We’ve covered a lot of ground this year.

Many of the terms above may have seemed unclear or irrelevant last September, but hopefully you feel much more confident now about your research skills, your communication  skills (writing and presenting) and — as many of you wrote in your social media reflections — your digital identity and use of social media, especially for learning.

Working with you all this year has been a pleasure, an adventure, and a great learning experience. Exploring concepts both established (academic writing skills, referencing) and emerging (digital identity, privacy, social networks for learning), your ideas and your questions have helped me to think more deeply about my own practices, about creating learning spaces (physical and virtual), and about the always-fascinating…

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Teaching with Twitter (this week)

Student views on Twitter (September 2013)

I’ve used Twitter for over four years and have integrated Twitter into my teaching for the past three. The practice evolves with time, and with the preferences of different groups of students, but it’s been a fascinating learning experience. A few examples:

• Exploring digital identities (Twitter chat with @bonstewart)
• Student-staff Twitter chat

We use Twitter in a 2nd year BSc Computer Science and IT course, Professional Skills, which focuses on research and communication skills, digital literacies, and social media. We use #ct231 as a course hashtag for our Twitter conversations. I also tweet from a course Twitter account @CT231 — this allows people to easily find our course on Twitter (and thus our course website) and allows students to Direct Message (DM) me, which has proven to be a popular alternative to emailing for many students.

Yesterday, Thom Cochrane posted this dynamic image, made with TAGSExplorer (thanks @mhawksey!), showing the activity on the course hashtag #ct231 for the past week (click the image for a dynamic version).

click image for dynamic version

It’s still early in the term, but this is a fascinating glimpse into our interactions on Twitter. In addition to the expected heavy activity from @CT231 and @catherinecronin, many students appear in the network, mostly as a result of our Twitter conversation in class yesterday. Well done to all!  @sharonlflynn (from CELT at NUI Galway) and @fboss (Education Officer and moderator of #edchatie) were active participants in our conversations, as well as several other educators in Ireland and beyond.

Also appearing in the #ct231 Twitter discussions this week are the participants in #icollab, an active network of students and educators who communicate and learn together across institutions and timezones (Ireland, UK, Spain, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia). CT231 is happy to be a part of this great network. Thanks to #icollab participants: @ThomCochrane, @heloukee, @mediendidaktik, @marett, @averillg and our newest and welcome additions, @topgold and @spacelyparts.

Finally, thanks to Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) and Alice Marwick (@alicetiara) who popped into our Twitterstream yesterday after learning (via a tweet) that we were studying and discussing their work in class yesterday morning; we aim to engage with you further during the term. Using Twitter, some students shared their summaries of key points from the articles, others posted their own thoughts. In any case, live interactions with authors whose work we are studying is one of the superpowers of Twitter, so we thank Nathan and Alice for joining in.

@CT231 "60% of teen Facebook users keep their profiles private"(Madden,M. 21/05/2013 Pg 2) #CT231

— Thomas Keane (@TomDKeane) October 1, 2013

@CT231 "Youth are sharing more personal information on their profiles than in the past " http://t.co/cEy2peDnlL #ct231

— Ryan Hehir (@RyanHehir1) October 1, 2013

"Social media information is broadcast to be looked at, as such people can look closely."This normalises activities such as stalking. #CT231

— Michael Fox (@mickneedscoffee) October 1, 2013

#ct231 pre digital social media, people took note of their environs, how about now? Does plugging yourself out amount to the same thing?

— Anthony Jackson (@jtony123) October 1, 2013

@alicetiara @CT231 very cool!

— nathanjurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) October 1, 2013

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There’s much more to say and to study about teaching and learning with social media tools like Twitter. This quick snapshot of one week is one small contribution. Many thanks to Thom Cochrane for running and sharing the TAGSExplorer analysis.

Interestingly, just after leaving our class yesterday, I saw the following tweet from Sharon Flynn, sharing an interesting study by Chris Evans.

BJET article> Twitter for teaching: Can social media be used to enhance the process of learning? http://t.co/uvWQQ2WEzA #cel263

— Sharon Flynn (@sharonlflynn) October 1, 2013

ccc

My answer to the question is yes.

sss

NOTE:

Texts studied in CT231 class and discussed via Twitter (1st October 2013):

The IRL fetish by Nathan Jurgenson (2012)

The public domain: Surveillance in everyday life by Alice Marwick (2012)

Teens, social media and privacy – Pew Internet & American Life Project (2013)

George Saunders’s advice to graduates New York Times article by Joel Lovell (2013)

Assessment in open spaces

Photo: Tay Railway Bridge (Dundee) CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Tim Haynes

“We have to build our half of the bridge, no matter who or where we happen to be.” – Colm McCann

Summary: Learning and pedagogical relationships are transformed when we engage with students in open online spaces or networked publics. These can become ‘third spaces’ of learning, beyond the binary of informal and formal learning. Once a closed classroom (physical or online) becomes open to the world, assessment options multiply, with many more opportunities for student choice, voice and creativity, and of course, feedback. [Slides] [Audio interview]

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This post summarises my talk at the eAssessment Scotland 2013 conference, “Assessment in Open Spaces”. I had planned to finish and publish this post last Friday, to mark the final day of the conference. However, hearing the sad news of Seamus Heaney’s death halted my progress and I wrote about Seamus instead. Today I return to eAssessment.

The eAssessment Scotland conference is a completely free, 2-week event which is open, distributed and accessible. The one-day conference at the University of Dundee on August 23rd was sandwiched between two weeks of online activity. Like the day conference, the online programme included keynotes and workshops, as well as numerous conversations on Radio EDUtalk. The conference, organised by David Walker, Kenji Lamb and others, is a unique opportunity for educators across many sectors — primary, secondary, third-level, community, commercial and government — to engage in discussions about learning and assessment.

I was one of three keynote speakers at the day conference, along with the wonderful Helen Keegan, a great friend and inspiration, and Fiona Leteney, whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time. I was invited to speak about Assessment in Open Spaces, but my presentation looked broadly at learning, teaching and assessment in open online spaces — and the imperative of doing this.

Assessment in Open Spaces from Catherine Cronin

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I began my talk with a quote from Joi Ito, focusing on the importance of networks: “I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process [of] establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.” As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman explain in their recent book Networked, in which they explore the growing phenomenon of networked individualism, we exist in information and communication ecologies that are strikingly different from the ones that existed just a generation ago. In terms of education — as with relationships, work, and much else — networked individuals have the potential to connect, and to learn, anything, anywhere, any time.

In this context, I examined three spaces in which networked educators meet networked students, and explored the affordances of these different spaces. The three spaces I examine are: physical classrooms; bounded online spaces (e.g. VLEs, closed online communities); and open online spaces (the web, open source tools and social media such as Twitter, blogs, wikis, etc.). This is illustrated in the diagram below (also on Flickr) which builds on Alec Couros‘s original diagram of The Networked Teacher. When we meet in physical classrooms and bounded online spaces, we learn and relate to one another but we cannot simultaneously learn with and from our networks, nor can we share what we are learning in the classroom (physical or virtual) with our networks. However, when we encounter one another in open online spaces, or Networked Publics as defined by danah boyd, we can interact and learn with our networks — communicating with one another, sharing our ideas and our work. And of course, we can share our Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) themselves. Open online spaces can become what Kris Gutiérrez, et al, call “Third Spaces” of learning; not formal learning space, not informal learning space, but a combined space. I find this concept of a “third space” very helpful in thinking about the possibilities of open online spaces for students and educators.

In open online spaces we are not limited by rigid identities and role definitions, as we tend to be in physical classrooms and bounded online spaces. Educators and students can engage with one another as learners and as social peers. When educators create opportunities for interacting with students in open spaces, we can teach and model digital and network literacies in authentic ways. Many students already have confident social digital identities, but developing an (online) identity as a learner, a writer, a scholar, a citizen — this requires practice, reflection and support.

The affordances of open online spaces for learning are many. Learners can establish new connections, within and beyond the classroom, based on their interests & passions. Learners can connect, share and work with others across the boundaries of institution, education sector, geography, time zone, culture and power level. And learners can build Personal Learning Networks which will serve them long after individual modules, courses and even programmes are finished. By engaging together in open online spaces we  encourage and support students as they engage in participatory culture (see Henry Jenkins).

In my presentation I shared several examples of learning and assessment in open spaces at different levels of education — primary, secondary and third-level.

In the 2nd year Professional Skills module which I teach, in a BSc Computing and IT programme, students develop their research, writing and social media skills. We use open tools and open practices in many ways:

• We use Twitter (@CT231 and #ct231) to engage in conversations with people beyond our module, e.g. authors we are reading, other students, other educators, etc.
• Students give Ignite presentations in class on topics of their own choice. Their presentations are shared in a CT231 Student Showcase using Scoop.it; some presentation videos are also shared using Bambuser. Both enable communication to and feedback from people outside of our class.
• We participated in the #icollab project in 2013, joining students from 4 other institutions (Salford, Berlin, Barcelona, Auckland NZ) to share student-created media, peer-to-peer. Students from Salford and Auckland used Galway (CT231) students’ presentations to develop their own ideas and presentations; the process will continue in 2014 with Galway students building on the work of other #icollab students.
• Students openly shared their final Digital Media Projects, using Twitter and other social media to spread the word and invite feedback.

In terms of assessment in these open online spaces, students collectively created the rubrics for assessing their presentations and digital media projects. But that was not the whole story. Through engaging in open practices throughout the term, we became a learning community that was not confined to one classroom or one online space. The classroom walls thinned progressively as the term progressed, so that we truly became nodes in a broader network — sharing work openly, engaging in discussion, inviting and giving feedback. The main assessments for the module — the presentation and digital media project — were opportunities for students to chose their own topics, media, tools and ways of working (individual or team), to express their own authentic voices, and to share, engage and learn beyond the bounds of our classroom.

I discussed many of these ideas further in Radio EDUtalk conversations connected with the conference: with Karl Leydecker and John Johnston immediately after the keynote, and in a more wide-ranging discussion with Kenji Lamb, John Johnston and David Noble one week later. There are many fascinating conversations from conference participants on the Radio EDUtalk website, all collected under the #easc13 hashtag — well worth checking out.

My sincere thanks to the all of the wonderful educators I met at eAssessment Scotland, especially Lynn Boyle for the warm Dundee welcome; David Walker and Kenji Lamb for outstanding conference organisation; Helen Keegan for inspiration on a grand scale, Doug Belshaw for (even) more goodness re: open badges, Mark Glynn for support and more new ideas, Sue Beckingham and David Hopkins for sharing their learning and good practice so generously, and Cristina Costa for encouragement on the PhD journey. And it was a JOY to meet several more Twitter friends for the first time! So happy to have met Sheila McNeil, Martin Hawksey, Derek Jones and Barry Ryan.

Finally, for dealing with surprise audio problems in the hall on the morning of my presentation, thanks to David, Kenji and the tech team. The unexpected glitch was great practice for us all in “dealing with uncertainty”. Stephen Heppell would be proud. 🙂

Photo: Dundee Railway Bridge, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Tim Haynes

A module ends, a hashtag continues

“Teaching and learning with social media changes the roles of students and lecturers and the scope of learning. We learn from one another, and from people across our networks. Our CT231 IT Professional Skills module ends this week, but we will continue connecting, sharing and learning via a variety of social media channels — all linked by our course hashtag, #ct231.”

..

CT231

Tomorrow is our last class session of CT231 for 2012-13 with 6 Ignite presentations scheduled — looking forward to it! (There will be an opportunity next week for students who have had to postpone their presentations to deliver them — this has been scheduled outside of class time.)  We’ve covered a lot this year…

Many of these terms may have seemed unclear or irrelevant last September, but hopefully you feel much more confident now about your research skills, your communication  skills (writing and presenting) and — as many of you wrote in your social media reflections — your digital identity and use of social media, especially for learning.

Working with you all this year has been an absolute pleasure and a great learning experience. Exploring concepts both established (academic writing skills, referencing) and emerging (digital identity, privacy, social networks for learning), your ideas and your questions have helped me to…

View original post 269 more words

International student collaboration with #icollab

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 Martin Fisch

Over the coming weeks, 2nd year Computer Science & IT students at NUI Galway will have the opportunity to collaborate with students in Spain (Barcelona), Germany (Berlin), New Zealand (Auckland) and the UK (Salford) on the iCollaborate or #icollab project. The project, now in its third year, is described by Helen Keegan as “a community of practice where… students work together on creative social tech projects that cross disciplines, levels, time and space.” I’m delighted to be joining Helen, Mar Camacho, Ilona Buchem, Thom Cochran and Averill Gordon — and our students — in participating in #icollab. Our CT231 class at NUI Galway will be bringing Ireland into #icollab for the first time.

Coordinating a project with students in 5 countries, crossing 12 time zones, and working in different terms has its challenges. But the project coordinators decided at the start to view these differences as an asset. Students in each location share their work and students in other locations can engage and connect — sometimes immediately, sometimes later that day, sometimes much later. As Helen Keegan describes:

“We’re now looking at the ‘tag-team model’ of education: the projects never end, as there is always a cohort to carry on, and lead into the next group, and when they overlap that’s great – that’s where the genuine collaboration happens. …Traditionally, we deliver modules/courses, neatly chunked into 12 weeks, with units of assessment, leading to grades etc. and that’s the way things are (generally) done. I’m not saying scrap all of that, but I do think that modules are best served as springboards to other things. Increasingly, students are connecting across levels and cohorts through Twitter and now we have ex-students getting together with current students, undergrads coming to postgrad classes (and vice versa) as they’ve connected online and have a genuine interest in getting involved in other groups/further curricula outside of their taught modules.”

As the Galway group’s first foray into sharing across those boundaries, CT231 students are posting their Ignite presentations online (via the CT231 Student Showcase), inviting feedback and conversation. In a Google+ hangout last week with NZ colleagues, Thom and Averill asked me if CT231 students would also be willing to post videos of their presentations, as another means of students connecting and sharing. The following day we did a trial run of this in class using the Bambuser app. Bambuser enables live video streaming from mobile phones or webcams. Using the app is simple: one click opens the app, one click records and streams (in public or private), and one click stops recording and uploads to the user’s Bambuser page. Once posted on that page, others can view the video and add comments.

One of our student presenters agreed to be filmed this week so that we could trial the app and learn how best to use it for recording presentations (thanks, Jack!). The experiment was a success and we learned some valuable tips for future recordings. After sharing the video via #icollab, feedback from New Zealand was available to us the following morning (thanks, Thom!). We look forward to extending the collaboration with students in the coming weeks.

Right now I’m looking forward to the next weekly Wednesday night Google+ hangout with Helen, Mar, Ilona, Thom and Averill and discussions with my students the following afternoon, as we collectively create the terms and the vision for #icollab 2013.

Image source: CC BY-SA 2.0 marfis75

Exploring digital identities

In previous posts, I have shared some of the resources I use for exploring digital identity and digital literacies with students (e.g. Resources for exploring digital identity, privacy and authenticity and Learning and teaching digital literacies). All of these resources and approaches have been developed through my work with 2nd year Computer Science and IT students as part of a Professional Skills module.

This year we are using an open course blog to share our work. Instead of preparing and posting static presentations as class notes, I prepare a blog post after class each week, summarizing what we explored and discussed. Students and others are free to comment and engage in discussion on the blog. Later this term, the course blog also will link to student blogs, as these are developed. We also have a course Twitter account @CT231 which you are invited to follow — or simply check our course hashtag #ct231.

This week’s class on Exploring Digital Identities was fascinating. Students engaged in reflection and discussion both in class and online. We were joined online (via Twitter) by Bonnie Stewart, whose excellent blog post Digital Identities: Six Key Selves of Networked Publics we analysed. The discussion continued on Twitter and on our blog with contributions from @sharonlflynn, @marloft, @tweety4bird and @fboss (so far). Many thanks to you all! Please check out our blog (link below) and feel free to join the conversation — we welcome your thoughts.

>> CT231 Week 6: Exploring Digital Identities

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Image source: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 KayVee.INC

Students, peer learning, and Google+

Two groups of higher education students in Ireland — IT Professional Skills at NUI Galway and Emerging Technologies & Trends at LIT-Clonmel — are engaged in a collaborative project using Google+. We are now midway through the project.

As described in my previous blog post, 2nd year students in IT Professional Skills (#ct231) develop research, writing and presentation skills, but the foundation of the module is the exploration and development of digital literacies. Students explore digital identity, changing definitions of privacy, search personalisation, social media, social networking, social bookmarking, and curating information.

When I learned that Bernie Goldbach was teaching a similar module (#litet) at LIT-Clonmel, and each of us planned to use Google+, we agreed to suggest a collaborative activity to our students. Both groups of students agreed to give it a try.

We began simply by creating a shared circle and outlining a joint assignment with specific discussion questions. For the past ten days, students have been posting ideas, reflections, links and comments on topics including privacy, digital identity, useful tech tools, and the use of social media in education. Students are referencing work by danah boyd, Jeff Jarvis, Cory Doctorow, Rey Junco, Eli Pariser and Ken Robinson, among others.

The most powerful aspect of the activity is the peer learning which is taking place. The dynamic is one of conversation and exploration. The asynchronous nature of the discussion allows reflection; engaging conversations are taking place over several days. Some students post public comments on Google+, and some post only to our shared circle. Interestingly, in this activity we are both practicing and teasing out the issues surrounding online privacy and digital identity.

What do students think? Below is a collection of student voices on the topics we are discussing, as well as opinions on Google+ itself. Students will be producing their own digital media creations later in the term — I look forward to sharing links to many of these.

We welcome your thoughts, feedback or questions: #ct231 and #litet on Twitter; #ct231 and #litet on Google+.

Student voices: Privacy and digital identity

“There is considerable debate about whether or not young people care about online privacy. Well as a young person I am very concerned about privacy and controlling the information I share online. I am very specific about what I want to make public about myself and even then I try to restrict who has access to that information.”

“I decided since Jeff Jarvis took interest in our work, I would return the favour and view his opinions on Privacy.”

“Just read an article online about privacy in the digital era. It’s amazing to see how the definition of privacy differs between people, companies, marketers etc… I never really appreciated the extent of how privacy influences an individual’s online experience. Privacy in itself is a fluid concept and users are not likely to read the privacy policy for each site mainly due to its length, this means users are placing a lot of trust in sites and effecting how comfortable they are socialising online.”

“‘Filter bubble’ is a new term to me since I started the CT231 module this September… The Filter Bubble is minimising the connections we can have and minimising the information we can share and, in turn, shared with us. IMO, to truly enjoy the Internet to its full potential, we must break out of our filter bubbles.”

“Before I started Professional Skills, I had little or no knowledge of the term ‘digital identity’. As I researched the topic, I slowly realised how much my digital identity affects me and will affect me in the future.  A shocking example is how employers commonly search for your online digital identity when you are in the running for a job. This is even more evident for the IT sector, where one could imagine the employers would have the relevant know-how to search for ones digital identity.”

“I do believe though that more of an effort should be made to educate users on the importance of online privacy but at the end of the day I guess it’s up to the individual how public or private he/she wants his/her social network to be.”

Student voices: Social media in education

“I think that using social media in the classroom is a great resource for students. If a student is working on an assignment and they don’t understand something, who better to ask then to ask the lecturer who set the assignment! Twitter allows this question to be posted instantly, the lecturer or indeed another student would be very prompt in their response. Twitter allows lecturers to instantly share their ideas or websites or posts that they have just discovered themselves with students, instead of having to wait until the next lecture. It can also allow people who are not in the class to engage in the classroom discussion, possibly including sources they know about or their opinion on a topic. Twitter lets the classroom open up and engage to a world full of people with experience and knowledge.”

“I have also noticed how well this particular class have taken to our use of Twitter and Google + to complete our assignments. It definitely feels like less of a chore when doing assignments on a social media site.”

“Students are willing to take on Facebook as an educational tool as well as a social one, whereas there is a reluctance amongst faculty members to do so. [This] mirrors the actions of our first year class, where most students welcomed the group, no faculty members did.”

“I agree there should be a more prominent link between sites like Khan Academy and social media sites. I’ve no doubt that in the future more sites like this will be established for the next generation of students to ensure even greater online collaboration between them and lecturers from all over the world.”

“I find sites like YouTube offer a great step by step solution to any questions you might have where the highlights from lectures are posted and are rated based on their quality. Recently our class has begun to use more social networking sites like Facebook and tools like DropBox to share notes and keep up to date with lectures I found this to be a great benefit in studying and managing my work.”

“Schools and colleges discourage students to go on their social networking sites during college/school hours by banning the sites on their computers. Yes, social networks could be a very distracting site for students while in school, but there are also many educational values to these social networks. I have a firsthand experience using social networks for educational purposes with this module and I feel that if more colleges and schools did it, using social networks for education could potentially rise by a high percentage.”

“I have only been a Dropbox user for an hour now and I have fallen in love with it.”

“Dropbox is an amazing site which enables you to save files and easily access them online. Since I have started to use the site I have found myself relying on it more and more. Before my introduction to the site, I would continually find myself in situations where I wanted to work on a project, but couldn’t due to the fact that my documents were stored on a computer at home or in college. Because of Dropbox, I am no longer faced with this problem. I look forward using the site for other reasons in the near future also. As we will be faced with many group work projects throughout the college year, I can imagine that it will be extremely useful to be able to share a folder as a group where we upload our part of the project as we do it.”

“I think a really big aid in learning these days is video tutorials. There are countless videos available on YouTube covering every aspect of every subject. It is really useful to be able to stop a lesson/lecture that is difficult to grasp at a certain point and rewind back and watch it again. I find it way easier to pick up a new concept if I am learning it through video as opposed to through a traditional classroom setting, or from reading textbooks. There is no pressure to grasp the concepts before the lecture moves on, maybe that is another factor that makes learning through video seemingly easier. The best videos I’ve found are from Khan Academy.”

Student voices: Using Google+

“I am liking Google+, I didn’t think I would like to make the transition from Facebook to Google+ but now I’m seeing that Google+ has all the best features from Facebook and a lot more good ones from other social networks.”

“I really dislike Google+ I have been using it since beta and have found that Facebook is much easier to navigate and share information, Google+ looks clean but I prefer Facebook’s layout, it is also restrained because you cannot create events and Facebook pages on certain topics and people. There are more options with Facebook although there may be issues with privacy.”

“I must admit at first I wasn’t overwhelmed by Google+ when initially joined. Facebook has become the norm for my social networking activates and trying to change over to Google+ felt like just what it was, an assignment for college. However, over the last couple of days Google+ has really grown on me. I like the idea of separating people into circles, social circles, academic circles and Career circles. Google+ is like a crossbred social network, trying to combine all the best bits from other social networks such as twitter and Facebook.”

“Google+ seems to be more universal as in people will be able to use it for a lot more than just talking to friends (like Facebook), the idea of setting up different circles for different areas of your life will be very useful.”

“When I began to use Google+ I was instantly impressed by how we could filter the information that we wanted to share through the use of circles. I felt more secure in the fact that we could post something jokingly to friends and not be embarrassed when older relatives or people it was not intended to be viewed by see it.”

Image (created for @purposeducation): CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Josie Fraser  

 

Student ideas for assessment

In Professional Skills #CT231, a 2nd year BSc IT module, students develop their research, writing and presentation skills — both in conventional formats (written reports and in-class presentations) and using web 2.0 technologies. The foundation of the module is the development of digital literacies, defined by FutureLab (2010, p. 3) as “the ability to participate in a range of critical and creative practices that involve understanding, sharing and creating meaning with different kinds of technology and media.”

CT231 students explore digital identity, changing definitions of privacy, assessing information, search personalisation, social media, social bookmarking, social networking, online publishing, and audio, video and multimedia presentations. In recent years, students have produced excellent and creative work for assessment such as writing and editing Wikipedia articles, creating “tip sheets” for other students and creating blogs (or expanding existing blogs).

This year, instead of giving students a list of options for projects, I decided to find out what students would like to create. Last week, I asked students the following question:

Students generated ideas on their own at first and then worked in small groups to identify similarities and differences. A few students struggled with the open-ended task (as illustrated in the photo at the top of this post). This is not altogether surprising. Students explained to me that this is the first time they have ever been asked to decide their own modes of assessment. Given that this was new territory it was affirming to see that most students welcomed the opportunity and suggested plenty of ideas — there was great energy in the room during these discussions! The range of ideas was diverse, more so than any list I could have formulated. This was great learning for me and something I will do again.

Student ideas included:

• create/edit Wikipedia article
• blog/website
• video tutorial(s)
• multimedia presentation (e.g. Prezi)
• video documentary
• podcasts (audio/video)
• Skype conference
• Google+/Twitter blogging
• photography
• interactive test

This week we discussed the list and made plans for students to select from these options. A grading rubric will be drafted and discussed with students, so that all work submitted for assessment — diverse as it may be — will be assessed using the same criteria for “effective communication”. I’ll share our rubric when it is finalised.

Image: source