Activity 4 (week 3)

• Individually consider how you might support the digital and learning literacies of students in your own subject discipline or department. Factors to consider might be: how far you should provide extra curricular provision or embed it within your subject discipline, how could you support students' use of both social software and institutionally provided software, which literacies do you consider to be most important.
• Share your thoughts/ideas within your group using any of the collaborative tools listed above
• Agree to develop and present one of these ideas as a student learning activity to the other group, clearly highlighting the target group of learners and the context of use, the intended learning outcomes (consider knowledge/skills/values), issues around feedback and assessment, and the motivations and expected benefits of using the tools you have chosen to support this activity.

Discipline: Media Communications

A potentially distinctive element of Media Communications is that social networking tools are objects of analysis. Within my department (Media, Film and Cultural Studies), there are several courses that explicitly engage with social networking and its social, cultural, political (etc.) impact. Bringing social software in is as learning tools would involve carefully thinking through the reflections that would need to be explored by students.

In response to this activity and the JISC comments, I would highlight the need for specific training courses for students. Employability has been an area (through PDP, Professional and Academic Development, etc. course) that is increasingly mandatory within students’ overall degree programme in UK HE institutions (limiting my comments to areas I have experienced). Staking quite a claim for the significance of these tools, how about compulsory training around social software?

Induction weeks often provide tuition on using to an institution’s central files, e-mail and the Virtual Learning Environment. There could an opportunity to bring students to a common point and to not assume digital literacies and ‘nativeness’. Such a framework would allow tutors to ‘assume’ a level of proficiency and later on, when necessary, to direct students to specific resources and ‘refresher’ training, etc.

It seems that there are great opportunities for incorporating various social software applications, but as this ELSS course has potentially demonstrated there is a lot to work through. Providing this instructional role may be too much. Tutors often provide tailored, module specific guidance on essays and readings for example, but can ‘assume’ a degree of capability and comfort by students in these areas. Could we explore the same for social software?

Things to think about – how it sits with institution’s VLE; student social life ‘invasion’ questions; different cross-discipline literacies; the extent to which social software is linked to assessments and then must be introduced within modules (same as essay workshops, etc.); which social software tools would be selected, resource issues (who – time/finance).

In short, I guess the learning activity I’m suggesting (for now) is a generic training course. This is not particularly subject-specific; I felt that to be able to advance with the subject specific learning and exploration, a level of comfort and familiarity would be useful.