Learning Technologist jottings at Goldsmiths

Twitter in Higher Education is a 20 page paper by Tony McNeill, Principal Lecturer in Blended Learning and Educational Technology base in Kingston University’s Academic Development Centre. The case studies begin in Section 2. Dr Sabah Abdullah’s students used Twitter as a broadcast tool in an economics course at the University of Bristol. Dr Monica Rankin used it as a conversational medium in a large cohort learning history at the University of Texas, Dallas. Sheffield Hallam used it to collect feedback; many students tweeted via SMS. The University of Colorado, Denver used Twitter to enhance social presence and so promote involvement, commitment and retention. There’s little in the way of large-scale studies and evaluations but lots of ideas – that’s how it is with very new tools.

On social bookmarking, the ever-creative Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard have produced something called H20 Playlists, “a shared list of readings and other content about an area of intellectual interest” giving learners a “wide open dialogue”. It enables learners in one community (and H20 is open to all) to gain a sense of who else in the world is thinking about the things they’re thinking about, often from very different perspectives. The video explanation is a good introduction to this ethos, or read Larissa, a Masters student in Library and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, who explains in more detail what it does. And finally, here’s one of the featured playlists, on remix culture.