New project: OER, Web 2.0 and ethics & technology
OLnet’s Tina Wilson and TERG’s Giselle Ferreira have successfully bid to the HEA Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences to develop a new project entitled: Using Open Educational Resources and Web 2.0 Tools to support Ethical Reasoning in ICS Project-Based Learning.
The project aims to investigate the potential of Web 2.0 tools and Open Educational Resources (OER) to support students engaged in project-based learning in ICS. Capitalising on existing online environments and tools, this project will explore the potential of these openly and freely accessible resources to provide a space where students can be encouraged to identify, engage with and discuss ethical issues that arise in their project work. In particular, the work will involve repurposing and reusing the recently published Introducing Ethics in Information and Computer Sciences OER created by Giselle and John Monk and freely available on OpenLearn.
The availability of Web 2.0 tools and OER affords the emergence of novel learning spaces. Ongoing debate on these innovations, however, has predominantly emphasised technical, production and copyright -related issues. This project proposes to look beyond these issues by focusing on pedagogy. By taking into account the ways in which lecturers and students view social networking tools, the researchers will seek to shed some light on the potential of such arenas for formal, informal and, perhaps, new and less fragmented models of, learning. As such, it is envisaged that knowledge gained from this project will inform further developments of the Ethics OER as well as the ongoing research developed by OLnet.
The project starts on the 1st December 2009.
October 25th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Giselle, this sounds great – and well done to you and Tina on a successful bid. Can you tell us which communication tools you are thinking of trying with the students?
October 29th, 2009 at 10:25 am
We’re discussing the choices at the moment, Karen – one idea was to use the ‘learning clubs’ feature of OpenLearn, but there are various problems with that. That aside, Tina has some preliminary interview data already collected from previous cohorts, and we’ll be taking this to inform our initial choices and planning. I’ll post an update once we’ve got more detailed plans.
Oh, I should have explained this first: we’ll be running the project as a trial within M450, the Computing project course, which Tina tutors. So, effectively, we’ll be starting the work with the students in February, and collect data during the time that leads to submission of TMA02 (in the first instance).
October 29th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Hi Karen,
Just to follow on from what Giselle was saying. We will be accessing Web 2.0 tools through OLnet.org. At the moment we are looking at Openlearn tools and what students would like to use. The latter will be based on suggestions made by previous cohorts of students and from the students involved in the project who start in Feb 2010.
Hope that helps.