higher education

Having now created a blog the blogging begins.

What dose the changing environment of higher education in a Web 2.0 world mean to you ?

Having taught MED 2000 now for the past 4 years, I feel that I am starting to run out of approaches to keep me engaged in the teaching and learning process. Obviously with the students they are receiving new information each week. I am therefore anticipating that the ED6114 module will supply new information and techniques to assist with the students learning. Throughout the modules to date we have discussed trying to establish deep learning as a principle with our students and I will be interested to see how Web 2.0 technology can support this.

Web 2.0 is a term that I had heard but was not aware of its meaning until going through the pre-reading for today. Terms such as facebook, twitter and blogs were all familiar although I have related them more to activities utilised by a younger generation. Now being able to marry Web 2.0 technology with these makes more sense. In the JISC executive summary it mentions Web 2.0 as a means of "communication, participation, networking,sharing" resulting in a " strong sense of communities of interest". It also very rightly points out the type of higher education world that I have been exposed to that being "guarded, careful, precise and measured".

It has been interesting watching the students in their interactions with online learning. At the beginning of the year in the discussion with my current group of students I raised the question of how they would source information to research areas generated by PBL scenarios. I was expecting to be inundated with information however the group seemed to be uncertain as to their approach other than to refer to the textbooks in the room which would for the most part be out of date.

This appears to reinforce the concepts mentioned by Matthew today and that also is referred to in the readings that although Gen Y seems very comfortable with new technology it has not been translated into their approach to learning. Access to the information seems to be less and less of an issue and in fact the diversity and speed of access seems to create its own set of problems. One of the concerns raised in the articles and also in the podcast described as a matter of urgency and "a significant and growing deficit area" was the area of information literacy concerning the student's ability to "search, retrieve and critically evaluate informaton from a range of appropriate sources and also attributing it".

Reference is made in the podcast by the student, Ellie Russell, and also in the readings that students still value face to face contact. This is encouraging but may not persist into the future. Rather than trying to 'persuade' students of the relevance of the tutor's position, I believe it is up to us to prove our relevance to the students by being up to date with our methods of teaching. Coming from a baby boomers generation (or in the case of IT  - the generation of the 'lost') I have no qualms in asking the students for assistance in accessing and utilising online technology. This may be easier for me as the students would anticipate that I don't possess their 'native' skills.

Another concern that I can envisage as a tutor is trying to be an educator adopting a different approach to teaching and learning with the new technology but not having an appropriate curriculum design or support network to allow appropriate alignment. I would hope that any of the institutions of higher learning would be working very dilligently to this common goal. The podcast refers to access, quality and reform and they must be of equal importance.

Look forward to learning more about Web 2.0. 

References

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/generalpublications/2009/hewe