Cloudworks as a ‘pedagogical wrapper’supporting the sharing of ideas across professional boundaries.

Rebecca Galley, Grainne Conole, James Dalziel and Ernie Ghiglione

European LAMS & Learning Design Conference, Oxford, 15th July 2010

What is Cloudworks?

• A place for sharing and discussions learning and teaching ideas

• Application of the best of Web 2.0 practices • Launched July 2009• Nearly 3,000 registered users• Over 80,000 visitors

Stats June12th – July 12th 2010

New technologies

Globalisation

Massification

Privatisation

Learner expectations

Industry requirements

Facultyroles

Foundations: The changing context of education

Foundations: Technology paradoxes

ParadoxesTechnologies not fully exploited

Little evidence of use of free resourcesMedia sharing

Blogs & wikis

ReasonsTechnical, pedagogical, organisational…

“Lack of time, research vs. teaching, lack of skills, no rewards, no support….”

Solutions?Case studies, support networks

Learning Design

Virtual worlds &online games Social networking

• conscious process• dialogue with

materials• creative process• communicative

process• social activity

(Winograd, 1996:64)

Key aspects: Design as...

juhansonin http://www.flickr.com/photos/juhansonin/2250554147/

Key aspects: Cloudworks design

• Object centred rather than ego-centred in nature

“The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are

connected by a shared object.” (Engestrom, 2005)

Key aspects: Cloudworks design

• Design framework based on sociality– The system needs to accommodate both the

evolution of practices and the inclusion of newcomers

– That individual identity is important so the system needs to support this

– People are more likely to use software that resemble their daily routines, language and practices

Design tools

Authoring environments

Pen and paper

Text or spreadsheet-based formats

Concept mapping

Meaning making

“Educational discussion of learning design issues remains patchy, whereas by comparison, technical discussion of the software is rich and sustained. While this pattern has been mirrored in the Sakai community (Masson, 2006), successful implementation of the learning design vision requires rich educational discussions of implementation and experiences with students.”

Dalziel, J. (2007, p.383)

The Challenge: rich and sustained pedagogical discussion

The project:

• Development of a new “embed” function necessary to allow a sequence that is uploaded to the LAMS Community to be embedded into any other web page (including of course Cloudworks!)

• Recommendations about the sort of information, or pedagogical ‘wrapper’, teachers may find useful when using or repurposing someone else’s sequence and how the Cloud may be presented and structured to promote discussion, collaboration and reciprocal sharing of new designs.

Supporting interaction and productive activity

A ‘pedagogical wrapper’

• Prompts for key information

• Recruitment of mentors

• Shared language

• Encouragement to keep participating

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mwparenteau/3079612428/

Questions