Posts made by Cristina Costa

peer review is definitely very important.
I don't have a very defined strategy but I would say: share what you know, ask what you don't yet know.
Provide a constructive critique of others' projects, be supportive and stimulate the flow of the conversation.
What is important is that people engage in a interesting, involving debate of ideas from which many other thoughts will develop.

Juts my 2 cheap cents...as usual!
HI,
I am Cristina. I used to be an EFL teacher but I now work at the University of Salford as a Learning Technologies development officer. My main goal is to engage staff and students alike in the use of the collaborative web. Recently I have given an workshop here at the Uni about blogs and wikis as tools to aid teh research writing process.
It was a good experience, but there still is a lot to do in this field. There still is a lot of resistance and some narrow-minded perspectives about the online world, amazingly not only by some member of staffs, but also by students.
Slowly we are getting there though. The key is not to give up! :-)

I have finished my masters dissertation about communities of practice and teaching training and will start my PhD soon around collaboration among supervisors and PhD students sometime soon.

REally looking forward to catch up with this conversation now.
Hi Steve,
what a coincidence! The world is getting smaller and smaller....or better, it is getting closer and closer! :)

Here in Salford it is my experience that the learning technology adopters are not so much related with the age factor, but with the wiling to innovate and the courage to leave the comfort zone. I have talked to many young academics who don't even want to hear about it. They are pleased with the fact that they are knowledgeable and think students should feel very lucky to have expertise knowledge being transmitted to them. And although expertise is needed, the way it is being transferred to the less experts (the students) is not the best way. Although many speak about the "digital natives", and that everyone want to learn in an active way, it is not so, simply because many students are not used to that kind of approach. What we are creating is a easy and fast society where everything is taken for granted, instead of a society of values where hard work and initiative are praised. Students are getting all the information for "free". They are pleased with the reading lists they are given by the lecturers, and many won't even bother to take it further and try to deep their own knowledge through different means and ways, simply because they are used to be fed and not to look for their own food (for thought).
On the other hand, I also have older academic staff to going the different direction and wanting to try this new approach, which is great. I have encountered a little bit of everything in this my new experience here in Salford.

Yesterday, I started a Blogs and wiki session with PGR students and also invited academic staff to join in. Not many showed up, but some did. As part of the sesson we had two PGR students from the Open University who have created research blogs to get in touch with a wider community and also to reflect about what they are doing. One of the things they remarked was that having blogs in blogger what a better solution than the one the institution offers, because they know that there is a good chance that once they finish their academic experience the blog will still be online for others to see and for them to go back to their knowledge base and learning progress record.
One of the speakers even remarked that the institution deletes one's blog after students leave the university and that is like throwing the students' notes in the bin, as they were worth nothing".
That tells a lot and that observation is a lesson we must learn, and fast: listen to the students. They are entitled to express their opinion and to make their needs and expectations known. After all, if there were no students, there wouldn't be universities and school, and that is something we tend to forget. We focus on what is best for the institution and the academic staff, and usually tend to forget the aspirations of our clients: the students. As we also forget to inspire them with new and innovative learning approaches and opportunities!
I totally agree that new legal, and more flexible guidelines must be decided very soon!
Indeed David.
The paradigm of education and the way we access, share and provide information is definitely changing. The students' needs and requirements and the students' expectations are also changing. I really enjoyed watching the video, because this is the rounteI hope one day all school and education institutions will take.
Dear Steve,
I couldn't agree more with what you have just said. That is exactly the kind of speech I adopt when talking to my staff about it.

At Salford we use Blackboard and someone had this illuminated idea of purchasing the Learning Objects to go with it: blogs and wikis for a closed environment. What a joke! It is hardly ever used. It offers a bad structure, no scope for creativity or personalization and when the academic year finishes and teh Blackboard modules roll-over you can kiss your blog and wiki goodbye. And I still haven't complaint about the fact that having blogs and wikis within a closed VLE totally mines the initial, and fundamental, purpose of such activities as blogging and wikiing (is this verb already officially recognized as such? :-) ) which is related with their (learning) social aspect.
I just can't understand how people can even consider to have blogs and wikis which are doomed to be excluded from blogsphere and wikiland, and more important even, that don't offer students the chance of keeping the work they themselves have created and the links and bonds that were developed during that process.

The institutional system sometimes does get in the way!
And of course the same happens with e-portfolios, which in my opinion are the CV of the future.
Why can't the students keep them after they leave school and the academic world?
Wales has come with a great initiative, offering any citizen with a Welsh zip code the chance to create an e-portfolio for free and keep it.
I think the Ministries of Education out there, as well as other authorities in the field like the European Union, should be looking at the sustainability of the solutions we aim to provide to benefit the student experience.

Just my 2 cents!