robert fitzgerald, phd

Our Digital Learning Communities (DLC) Project considered the potential of social software to support peer engagement and group learning in higher education. The project established a series of pilots that examined ways in which social software could provide students with opportunities to engage with their peers to supplement the more formal aspects of their education. It spoke with teaching and support staff about the use of social software to support learning, and to students about how they saw social software being used in their university lives. It established a wiki-based cookbook that provides ideas and suggestions for the use of social software, and conducted surveys of staff and students’ use of new social technologies. The full report is available for download.

Jen Millea from education.au recently picked up Yoni Ryan's paper, Do you Youtube? Wanna come to MySpace? Yoni is on our Carrick Project team and presented this keynote at the FYHE Conference, QUT Brisbane, 4-6 July. In this paper Yoni says:

The explosion of subscriptions to social networking sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook leads us as educators to some fundamental questions abou the purpose and nature of university education, issues which have been ignored in the last decade as Western governments, along with vice-chancellors, have trumpeted the economic, utilitarian and vocational benefits of a university education. Such sites may be designated 'social' in nature, and in one sense they are. But they also direct attention to the individual, as the centre of a virtual 'exclusive' group. What does it mean to an education system notionally geared to the 'class' as a group, to inclusivity as a goal of education, and to the notion of tolerance of difference as a result of exposure to the class? Should we be encouraging the display of self that social networks allow as a healthy way of forging identity in a world characterised by increasingly undifferentiated and global 'selves'?