Clive McGoun Dept. Social Care & Social Work Exploring learning outside the institutional platform
Why? My Moodle areas may be effective repositories for learning materials but there’s little evidence to suggest that they’re effective spaces for actively working with those materials or learning together with others. When ideas are produced they tend to be in the form of online discussions or assignments which are locked down in databases and difficult for students to 'export' as they move through their degree and graduate. What's put in Moodle stays in Moodle. To overcome this limitation, I introduced a platform that could provide students with a space to work: to think out loud, to work together, produce together and share their ideas with wider networks. An open space on the web where they could grapple with the difficult issues of living and working online; where they could create and manage their own digital footprints. Communication, Activism & Social Change, a Level 6 unit I teach, explores the use of digital tools to effect change. One way in which that can happen is by understanding the tools, being able to use them competently and exploiting the effect of using them in distributed networks.
What? A decentralized network of blogs and social media accounts that feed into a Course Hub. How? Students created their own blogs and presence on social media that connects a series of networks and is aggregated onto a Course Hub. The Hub makes visible the total flow of all activity through the networks. I set up a self-hosted Wordpress site for that Hub and used the Feedwordpress plugin to aggregate content via RSS feeds from the students’ external sites. More information:
http://www.clivemcgoun.net/commactivism http://connectedlearning.tv/what-is-connected-learning http://cogdogblog.com/2014/07/14/feed-wordpress-101/
c.mcgoun@mmu.ac.uk | Dept. of Social Care & Social Work
20 Students 20 Blogs 650+ pieces of ‘work’ in 8 months
#Commactivism