LIN-RRoger Rees, Ruth Catlow, Leonard Houx, Miles Metcalfe

Original aims

• Adapt and apply social networking and “web 2.0” to practice-based pedagogy

• Integrate institutional systems into the technology students and staff actually use

• Incorporate the use of learner-owned technology into the learning process (PDP)

• Ways to understand extra-institutional versus institutional systems through the prism of a PLE

Our audience

• Learners, teachers, and learning support - in a specialist vocational HE institution serving the creative industries

• Learners are 18+, career-focused, motivated within their own discipline - communications or design

• We assumed they’d be pretty tech-savvy

Approach

• User-led

• Small-scale

• Loosely-coupled

• Take a cross-college unit

• With a view to wider embedding

Findings and issues

• Parallels between learning and “web 2.0” activities can be over-estimated

• Deeply-held and un-reflected upon assumptions about learning and teaching

• Issues don’t reside neatly in the technical, pedagogical, institutional or social domains

• There are a lot of myths about the “netgen”

Findings and issues• Problems: top-down, technology-led, design-

intensive

• Paradox - you can’t be told to be radical

• Attempts to innovate systematically encourage understanding but create challenges to implementation

• “Strong” PLE - pedagogically desirable but requires shifts in many interconnected areas, technical, pedagogical, institutional, and social

One key message

Context is king