shape

LKL Workshop 12 September 2007

 

Presentation by John Cook and Drew Whitworth

Debate 2: If you are learning or studying how can you shape the process and content of your learning?

 

Notes on John’s C's take (See Cook, 2007, for detail).

 

Overview

 

• By engaging in the appropriation and adoption of technology learners can give technology a new, possibly peculiar, spin that others may adopt later. The generation of context is therefore characterised as an action on tools whereby a user actively selects, appropriates and implements learning solutions to meet their own needs (Bakardjieva, 2005)
• The user is an informed participant in the generative process.
• Speakers do not take their words and expressions out of dictionaries, but out of other people’s mouths (Bakhtin,1986)
• Called ‘technology-as-speech’ metaphor - hence I am interested in user stories

 

Current work on UGC

 

Hybrid

 

• Networks surrounding reusable learning objects (RLOs)
• User generated content & Web 2.0
• Mobile devices

 

User Story

 

“We were holding many things at the event, like our bags, we had a carrier bag with all the leaflets and everything in so our phone was already out and we were taking pictures so we didn't have to look into our bags to find paper or the module booklet, so it was convenient in that sense.”

 

User story, to me, highlights the fact that there is something very personal about mobile phones:

“our phone was already out”

“it was convenient”

 

• Like a car, part of identity, fashion statement
• Unlike car you can take you mobile to bed and use it on the toilet!
• You can use your mobile on the train to announce personal details, even take it to the beach …

 

As the Learner Generated Contexts Group (2007) put it, learning is: “generated through the enterprise of those who would previously have been consumers in a context created for them.” Learner Generated Context is very personal and tied up with identity.

 

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References

 

Cook, J. (2007). Generating New Learning Contexts: Novel Forms of Reuse and Learning on the Move. Invited talk at ED-MEDIA 2007 – World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications, June 25-29, Vancouver, Canada. Paper available from news item “John Cook's invited ED-MEDIA talk - paper now available” at http://www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk/news.htm

 

Bakardjieva, M. (2005). Internet Society. The Internet in Everyday Life. London: Sage Publications.

 

Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. In (Ed.) Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (p. 60-102). Austin: University of Texas Press Slavic Series 8.

 

Learner Generated Contexts Group (2007). . Accessed April 2007.http://learnergeneratedcontexts.pbwiki.com/Definition+Issues