Journal: Notes from Rennie and Mason Ch 1 + 3

Some notes I took from Mason and Rennie's (2008) E-Learning and Social Networking Hanbook. These are not summary notes but points I found helpful/provocative.

Chapter One: Social Networking as an Educational Tool

p.5 "through appropriate course design, we can help learners to pursue their 'selfish interests' of passing the course, while at the same time adding value to the learning of other students"

p. 11 Book's wiki

p.12 Prensky is mentioned here. Noticed that we look at some of his articles next week. I'll flag up now that David Buckingham's 2007 Beyond Technology is very helpful for thinking through a lot of this.

p.13 Comments on cultural specificity of learning.

p.14+15 Collaborative elements and collective intelligence.
(How does this fit with p.5 and selfish interests?)

p. 17 Constructivism

p.19 Connectivism

p.20 Learning Design Tools

p.21 Assessment - positive contribution to the learning process (again, wondering about idea of selfish needs and 'market' education)

Chapter Three: Selecting the Media Palette

p.44 Commentary on 'the Net Generation', 'Millenials', and 'homo zappiens'.

p.48 Distributed media

p.50 "The introduction of distributed media resources needs to be a way of creating new opportunities for sharing and extending learning, rather than constraining learners into different forms of learning participation"

p.52 "In each of these examples [wiki], the educational process and the required output(s) come first, the wiki is just an alternative solution to face-to-face meetings, with the advantages that the wiki is asynchronous and builds a written record of interaction"

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During course and module revalidation, an issue was raised about how time consuming working through individual student contributions to a wiki could be.