Sunday 8 January 2012

Ed Tech Creative Collective - Week 1 Introductions

This is my post for the 1st week’s activity of the Ed Tech Creative Collective project to introduce myself and outline what I hope to gain from doing the course. I work for the JISC RSC Scotland as advisor for curriculum and deputy manager. RSC Scotland is funded to support FE and some HEIs in Scotland to promote and support the use of technology for learning & teaching.

This is a great opportunity to get first hand experience of how popular social media (Blogs / Facebook / Twitter) can be integrated for learning purposes and get a better understanding of the issues that arise. I have done a lot of work around e-Safety lately and I get asked a lot about using social media with learners. I think technology continues to challenge conventional pedagogy and the concepts around social media (collaboration, sharing, reflection) are desirable, of benefit to learners and are pushing the boundaries even further. Education establishments are rightly concerned about e-Safeguarding students and staff but in my experience are having some difficulty working out the procedures and policies they need while at the same time not stifling creativity and innovation.

Participating in the course will help me to better advise others and help to provide solutions and suggestions on how social media could be applied across the curriculum as well as providing a focus for me to explore a range of technologies recommended by others on the course.

One of my colleagues Grainne Hamilton participated in a MobileMOOC last year and blogged about it here. Having failed to keep up at a couple of huge online conferences in the last couple of years, the opportunity to participate in a NSMOOC (not so massive open online course) was very appealing and I hope I will be able to contribute effectively to the learning experience of the community. Thanks Colin for organising the project.

I plan to write up an account of my experience to share with colleagues and I hope that Colin might help me to write up a case study from an organisers perspective too.

Good luck everyone - I’m sure we’ll all walk away with a few brownie points.

3 comments:

  1. This is very much an experiment. The timescales - one assignment per week may be challenging and the diverse range of participants will also provide a challenge, I'm sure. Nothing ventured, nothing gained...

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  2. Welcome Joan. I look forward to participating in #edtechcc with you.

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  3. Hi Joan,
    Thanks for highlighting some of the important outcomes I suspect many of us will be hoping to have achieved through participating in edtechcc.
    I too hope I'll be better placed to support those with whom I work (forgot to mention that in my post!)

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