Monday, October 29, 2007

Friday parallel sessions - quick summary

First session - Using Wikipedia to reenvision the term paper

I really enjoyed this session because it covered a lot of information about what worked well and what didn't, so participants could probabmy avoid the numerous mistakes you might make first time you tried something like this. Probably not for the anti-Wikipedia people but I quite like the idea of putting your money where your mouth is - if you don't like what is in Wikipedia, put in better stuff. I enjoyed this student quote too:

“This assignment felt so Real! I had not thought that anything I wrote was worth others reading before, but now I think what I contributed was useful, and I’m glad other people can gain from my research.”

Second session - Models for Collaborative Online Learning: Pedagogy, Design, and Epistemology


This was probably the least valuable session I went to at the whole event but I think I picked wrong (yes, I know, the clue is in the title) - if you don't know anything about web 2.0 and its role in online collaboration then it is interesting to review and their "how and why of the transitions from WebCT to community web to wiki spaces to social softwares" were interesting but nothing really all that new. My two tangential "take-aways" were:

1. the phrase "Alexander hypothesised in his tableau...." funny mostly because the presenter was talking about Bryan Alexander as if he were some old dusty research prof, I'd wished for all the world that he had been sat in the room to do one of his customary "ha!"s

2. html graph - a very cool (if a little useless) html graph plotter for websites - this is reminiscent of the tagclouds from sites thing you may have seen from me before(http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/) So for example this blog site looks like this:




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