Learning styles and ICT

I have also completed the VARK learning styles questionnaire. It did not surprise me to find my results fell in the multi-modal range. I like the re-enforcement from different approaches that visual, aural, read / write and kinaesthetic methods offer. That being said it was interesting to compare my learning style with those of my colleagues who have also done the test. The lesson learnt is that students too have many different learning styles and therefore lesson plans should accommodate multiple methods to enhance active student participation.

ICT current trends: Sixteen myths about Online Teaching and Learning in a Higher Education: do not believe everything you hear.

This article explores myths in relation to context, strategies and assessment in online learning. Having both recently undertaken and been involved in the processes of developing an online course, I found the article pertinent to my understandings and experiences of such tasks. It as interesting to note that the first problem addressed by the authors was that of team group dynamics in an online forum designated with a collaborative task. My personal experience is that this is where new boundaries in course development and involvement were the most challenging. Establishing ground rules for group orientated tasks can of itself be inherently challenging but moving such requirements to cyberspace creates a whole new set of performance requirements. Problems include team formation, immediacy requirements, international differences in anticipated standards, and cultural and language barriers. Face to face interaction can help to diffuse some of these challenges due to body language deployment, emotional overtones in language and different time constraints in developing rapport. The authors pose some interesting solutions including the role of student as group facilitator and the role of online tools such as chat rooms and synchronous applications, to enhance rapport building within the team. Such an argument for the use of these processes crosses over with the discussion around the role of online learning promoting isolation and lack of community whereby the authors incorporate the requirement of compulsory engagement with such tools in curriculum development. Having had a first hand experience of such requirement sI can now see that they did provide a forum to engage with other students at a level that was conducive to team building capacities.

Qing L, Akins, M. (2005). Sixteen myths about Online Teaching and Learning in a Higher Education: do not believe everything you hear. Paper to be published in TechTrend 2005.

Digital Natives: Digital Immigrants

Prensky’s (2001) argument on digital immigrants versus digital natives is very positive in that it offers hope to me, a digital immigrant, that there is a chance I can adapt and become assimilated into the new Web 2.0 world. Of particular interest were his views of the role of both ‘Legacy’ and ‘Future’ educational content in the language of the digital natives and the dynamics that such material establishes between “learning new stuff” or “learning new ways to do old stuff.” He concludes that the role of computer games will offer maximum advantage to educational systems. Being a mother to a child of the net generation and seeing first hand the enormous educational opportunities that online game have offered, I can appreciate his sentiments. However I do get concerned about the impact that constant interaction with computers is having on the social constructs of this generation and reinforcing further the reliance on a computer interface for education requirements compounds this problem. However the creativity that he forecasts in establishing the possibilities of such games and their impact on developing cyber interaction and education potential may offset the negative social impacts of such progress.


Prensky M. 2001 Digital native Digital Immigrant: On the Horizon MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001
2001 Available at:
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 world has had both a personal and a professional impact on me. Personally the Web 2.0 higher education platform has allowed me to undertake tertiary studies in a situation where, as a full time carer of a child with a severe chronic illness, I would have otherwise been excluded from such activities because of time and commitment constraints. Moreover, the international collaboration that I was required to undertake in such courses has lead not only to social networking across a broad range of countries but also to the development of friendships through establishing links with those people when they have visited Australia. In turn this has lead to a new world of both international professional contacts as well as a greater personal understanding of health systems reform across the developing and developed world. It has been interesting to note that within developing countries, access to and use of the Web 2.0 for higher education purposes has been seen as playing a vital role in the advancement of the training of health professionals to international standards. The prescribed reading; Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World briefly addresses such an issue (point 84) from a UK perspective and notes: “It is not unreasonable to foresee the emergence of a small number if international purveyors of online HE which will come to dominate the mass market globally.”
Within the Australian context, universities such as the University of NSW have seized the opportunities that such online education provides and accommodated openly to such a market. As a consequence online international student numbers have rapidly increased to the point where it is anticipated that more than half student attendance for Master’s courses in health will be online enrolments from international students.

From an immediate professional perspective my present students have experimented with a number of online tools as a medium in which to conduct their group learning requirements. We have gone from group email and using wikis to finally settling on Google docs as a forum for collaborative requirements. My biggest challenge as a tutor has been to inculcate within the students an imperative for critical analysis. Their willingness to adopt the recommendations of Wikipedia unchallenged has slowly been replaced with an understanding of the need to extend such baseline knowledge with confirmation or refutation from further online peer reviewed sources. It would appear that my experience with students is common as again the UK reading Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World (point 39) confirms that such ready adoption of data without critical analysis in UK student learning has been seen as a challenge to the meaningful use of such educational resources.

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World: available at:
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/higher-education-in-a-web-2-0-world-report-published/

The course was a worthwhile experience and very enjoyable. Apart from learning about the wide appliations of Balck Board. it was of gret advantage to access various products that assisst in ITC such as DropBox, Google Buzz, KeepVid. Moodle, Mendeley, HotPotato, Turn it on, Open office.

ICT can be frustrating

The lessons that I learnt from yesterday's failure to retrieve a wiki post lead me to consider the ramifications such mistakes could have for students. Given that students would usually be using their own computers or expecting to duplicate their data on a USB, such mistakes may not frequently arise, however such experiences do lend themselves to us for consideration of the negative impacts technology can have on students. If we are to involve the use of such tools as blogs, wikis and dropbox, it would be reasonable to provide short course IT updates for those who need them. Other wise you may definitely place some students at a disadvantage.

The course is very interesting not just from the perspective of tertiary education but from the fact that such principles can be relevant to education processes for chronic disease self management.