Networked Learning 2006 (continues)
The narrative continues from yesterday .....A session entitled 'Exploiting online networks and shared repositories to support the professional development of distance tutors' (Churchill, Hewling and Macdonald) held my attention this morning, linking the heuristic Communities of Practice with the reality of developing staff from a range of cognate areas and degrees of participation and within varied degrees of distance learning.
Interactive participation within and from the assembled audience added a helpful dimension to the dialogue both during and subsequent to presentations from Janet Macdonald and Tony Churchill; this served to reinforce the commonality of pedagogic issues in spite of contextual difference (FE/HE in FE/HE and oncampus/blended learning/distance learning) and the need to provide a forum for interaction and community development to support tutor learning.
Sustainability of use of portal/VLE (which and what and why) community environment was the subject of some discussion; a sense of common purpose would seems to be key to user participation ( a critical mass?), as indeed it would be in the development of a Community of Practice.
The symposium concluded with an introduction to the PROWE project (JISC, OU, University of Leicester) and the development of elgg.
This led to a discussion with a colleague from the University of Surrey on the merits and implementation of Sharepoint Portal Services, a learning space being used to some good effect at 'my' college; an unexpected bonus since educational developers of this software are not easily met.
It is sessions and subsequent encounters of this nature where theory and practice start to come together that make such events really worthwhile.
posted by Jane @ 2:09 pm
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