with the students certainly not confirming to the passive and silenced undergraduate roles of the seminar room or lecture theatre. (2009: 170‐1)
Fitzgerald, Steele et al. (2009) report on the Digital Learning Communities project funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. They focused on the role of social software and networking in three universities. A set of seven pilot courses using reflexive blogging, wikis, folksonomies, collective tagging and media sharing and a specialized social networking site for animation (MyToons) were evaluated. Two interim surveys were conducted to correlate results from the evaluative pilots to wider attitudes and values towards and comparative cultures on sharing and networking. The studies revealed that staff motivation for experimentation with Web 2.0 was higher in these projects than is normally found, because it was more closely tied to research and scholarly agendas. The pilots included a cohort of courses in New media and Information systems, and a course in Applied Ecology. The integration of social media within the curriculum was deployed in order to advance future professional practice, and more specifically, to equip students with industry‐ready, creative and critical literacy skills. Educators in the information systems and media‐related courses designed the curriculum purposefully and with a range of activities using particular Web 2.0 technologies so that they would introducing students to authentic and hands‐on issues of copyright and media practice while inviting self‐ representation and creativity as writers and media practitioners. The iCamp project is an example of a project that is attempting to use Web 2.0 technologies in a cross‐border collaborative problem‐based learning project. In the first trial graduate and post‐graduate students from four different partner universities in Turkey, Poland, Estonia and Lituania participated. Eight cross‐cultural groups of four or five students were formed. The iCamp educational intervention model is designed to support competence development in self‐organised intentional learning projects in digitally mediated environments. The projects used a rich set of tools including shared workspaces, Instant Messaging, videoconferencing, a content repository and an e‐portfolio tool (for a full set of interventions and see Kieslinger, 2009). The research team adopted a design‐based research approach, with a strong focus on designing courses for real life trials, getting feedback from practitioners and feeding this knowledge into advanced pedagogical concepts and new technological developments. Although a number of challenges were cited regarding cultural variation in teaching and learning styles, the benefits the environment provided in terms of facilitating engagement across cultural contexts was deemed to enhance innovative teaching and learning practices. The findings from the project highlighted the benefits of experiential approaches and peer learning and the ways in which technologies could be used to support these. Väljataga (2009), describing an online course from an Estonian university that participated in the iCamp project, reported that the facilitators gained a lot by being involved, including an understanding of the benefits of social media tools and services within their teaching practices. The experience highlighted the recognition that there was a need for a different type of role in these environments, one that simulates mentoring rather than top‐down teaching approaches. In the second iCamp trial (involving faculty and students in the four institutions), Law and Nguyen‐Ngoc (2008) demonstrate that although the collaborative learning environment can support self‐directed learning for some students, other students
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