First thoughts

Tonight is our first face to face session on the University of Hull's digital broadcasting and publishing course. This is the culmination of a series of courses and explorations by staff in Cascade over the past year, led by our ernest explorer and pathfinder Theo.

Over the next few weeks (during the course itself) I intend to maintain this blog as a stream of consciousness type aide memoire of our collective experiences. i am hoping some of the other members of the class will read by entries and find them at least vaguely interesting and worthy of comment (please!).

My first thoughts need to be tempered by the recognition that this is a new group and one in which we have not yet established the full dynamics which will doubtless emerge shortly with familiarity. It struck me as interesting to note how reluctant we were initially to give the tutor meaningful feedback. We clearly had opinions and many were strongly held but few people were prepared to wade in publicly and announce them. Not surprising really but it will be interesting to see if people are more prepared to open up through the more intimate medium of the blog we were asked to create. I think this kind of software (e.g. FlickR, blogs, etc) has tremendous potential in face to face session as well as the obvious uses at a distance. It could be used to break the ice and encourage participants, in the early stage of a course, to open up more easily and contribute more of their personal ideas.

Comments

[George Barker]

As a late arrival I found it be quite difficult to join in the discussions,especially as they were quite brief. Could be we are a reflective group and needed more time to bond and reflect the impact of Web2.0 on the way we communicate. Yes , this software has immense potential if we can harness collective intelligences without the barriers that face 2 face can erect.

Since the session I have wondered about the differences between blogs, wikis etc . The definition is quite clear - as emphasised by Theo's presentation - but the net providers seem to muddy the pitch e.g. Flicker has both an element of blogs and wikis, jot wiki has elements of blogs and writely , edublog overtly offers a wikispace, Writely I suppose could be used a blog and a wiki.

As an individual user I think this will work fine but if we use blogs, wikis etc as a team administrative tool might we need common agreement on how we use them?

I am thinking for example of our Tawiki - some pages invite a 'writely 'style response e.g. staff meet action points, other might be making a factual statement or raise an issue of common concern, solving diary issues - do we do a ' writely ' on the main text or should we use the comment box ' blog' style.

Do we need to informally choose different fonts/ colours to differentiate contributors? Since everyone would be able to create a page would the creator indicate how to use it and compose summaries/ draw conclusions Do we need a 'administrator' with responsibility for keeping the whole tidy and manageable. could that responsibility be rotated?

Perhaps it doesn't matter but we ought to talk about this.

Extending this further. If I used these tools in a classroom context would similar issues arise?
George

[Theok]

Thanks for this Kevin. I was a bit nervous myself, usualyy am for a first session, with a group of covering such a wide range of interests, expertise and backgrounds (university, school, CLC, technical, software developer, and LA advisory staff to name but a few). However, this should provide some interesting group dynamics and hopefully all will benefit from our collective work and reflection. I note we still have a couple of students could not make the first session to welecome.

To respond to George,I think you missed some of the earlier discussion, the last hour was spent ensuring everyone was at the stage where they would be in a position to leave confident enough to continue with their blog and Flickr by themselves. Don't worry we will have many more discussions before the end as people become more comfortable and the group establshes itself.

[Penny]

Hello
Just trying out this comment function :) I enjoyed the first session and I thought there was quite a bit of interesting input from the group - there was a lot to take in and I personally need time to assimilate it all and, (as discussed:) I find it difficult to multi-task which seems to be very much the way of things now (email while skyping while phoning while eating etc.).I am sure it is possible to ice-break online as I have "got to know" many students very well in this way but if there is a possibility of a 1:1 chat over a cup of tea (as there was) I would opt for that! However,perhaps, as Kevin suggests, it would be possible to all input thoughts / answers to a tutor question in an anonymous way to a collaborative blog simultaneously- a bit like you do with the voting devices or Talk To Learn Brainstorm - people may be braver to "speak up" like this than speaking to a new group?

[RX-order]

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[school_dubl]

With the new 2011. Year! Congratulations.