SMARTEN UP!

http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/newsdetail1.asp?storyid=200796

While narratives are often developed with characters and drama to share a personal experience, I chose to create a digital narrative that will be educationally instructive. It is intended as an alternative mode of presenting ‘how to find information on the internet’ and is to become a learning aid for Topic 3 of my Moodle course, Discover: a short course in digital information literacy.

I used Stupeflix after first trialing Webslides. I had hoped to use webslides because my topic involved screen shots of websites, but I kept getting a screen message “we are experiencing technical difficulties”. If a site is not reliable, then it shouldn’t be used!

I found Stupeflix to be great, and very intuitive to use. It was a matter of opening an account, importing images, and overlaying music or other audio as appropriate, then publishing. However, I had uploaded 58 images when I discovered that a cost would be involved! (perhaps I hadn’t read the manual :). I was so impressed by Stupeflix that I paid an annual subscription and went on to publish the complete narrative.

Reflection on this project: It took ages to work through the options of cogdogroo. Indeed, the greater time spent on this project was checking out the Dominoe narrative and comparing storytelling products. However, I had in mind that I would use video so it was a matter of choosing the video software that best suited my purpose of demonstrating some websites, overlaying some text graphics and contextualising everything with text slides and images from the course.

The digital storytelling project has required me to reflect on how to do an information search on the Internet, to “teach myself” the steps to do searches on different channels, and to replicate the steps in a multimedia narrative that is meaningful to viewers. Hence, the process of constructing a digital narrative has been a valuable, reflective learning experience. It reinforces in my mind what Sanders et al (2009) have said about the value of narrative for reflection and for making meaning. The experience can only be more powerful if done as group work.

See more …

Sanders, J., Murray, C., & McPherson, M. (2009). Chapter 9: Reflective Learning for the Net Generation. In T.T. Kidd & I. Chen (2009), Wired for Learning: An Educator’s Guide to Web 2.0. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

A brave college is adding I-Pads to the compulsory stationery list of its Year 9 students.

http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/9869739/ipads-compulsory-for-school/

I have used Voki to create a text-to-speech avatar and created a “talking head” welcome to my Moodle course.

The MediaWiki Experience

These are my insights from using MediaWiki for the collaborative class activity:

1. MediaWiki can be incorporated into a LMS and by doing so, becomes a gated and protected learning space.
2. MediaWiki permits participants to create pages and to create and edit content within those pages. It is a collaborative work space where each participant manages their level of contribution.
3. Interestingly, once a message is posted to a wiki page, it becomes the content that every other user sees and works with. Earlier versions are not easily accessed, and so an entire document can be shaped into a format or structure that is one author’s preferred expression, rather than the desired expression of everyone in the group. I noticed that in our group exercise, someone created a page structure with contents, headings, etc. It made it easier to “fill in the gaps” and move forward on the project to achieve the task once that structure was there, but at the same time, a structure that was not mine seemed “odd”, and I didn’t feel right to alter it.
4. MediaWiki contrasts with WebCT Vista’s threaded discussion forum where each author’s content remains separate and where each author retains some ownership and control over both their ideas and the expression/presentation of those ideas. A forum also enables people to see at a glance a “hot issue”.
5. The key difference in Wikis and Discussion Forums as social learning tools is that Wikis enable groups of learners to collaboratively shape a perspective on an issue or topic, whereas Forums enable groups of learners to discuss to varying lengths and depths their individual views on an issue and to moderate their views after feedback and reflection.
6. The participant of a Wiki sees what is published (the “latest” content is the content), whereas the participant of a Discussion Forum chooses threads (self-selects content) to view and respond to. A participant of a Wiki project may or may not know how an argument was formed (they may not have seen every iteration of the content), whereas the participant of a Discussion Forum will have the option of seeing all perspectives on an issue.
7. I believe that Forums are very powerful aids for reflection and social learning. Wikis appear to offer an online work space rather than an online discussion space.

Features of MediaWiki

I am not sure I have fully understood the features of MediaWiki. It appears that the ‘talk’ feature is really just a term that equates to posting content. It isn’t discussion. Hence, I am unclear about the difference between ‘talk’ and ‘contribution’ as used by MediaWiki (they seem to be the same thing).

The history feature is useful for teachers for the reason of being able to monitor which learners have contributed to the collaborative space.

As with all new technology introduced to a learner group, there can be differences in how learners intuitively use the technology in the absence of specific instructions about features or absence of prior training. I have read of MET students working on various different pages in MediaWiki but I only ever participated on the Discussion Page. I’m not sure whether this was appropriate or not !

DVD Production is stress-free. I used Windows DVD Maker and found it excellent for making a basic DVD tool. The software has on-screen prompts and intuitive functions. I easily worked through the process of starting a new production, saving the file, uploading a video, uploading still pictures (which Maker automatically turned into a slide show), writing a title for the product, adding an audio track to the slide show, and previewing overall production. I then opted to change the font for the title and I saved the production again. I then burned the DVD. Total production time was around 25 minutes. It could have taken less.

A task that I will tackle in my workplace over the next six months is re-design of the eLearning components of an undergraduate course in Early Childhood Education (one of many courses for an undergraduate degree in ECE teaching).