REVIVE project: workshop documentation
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The document summarizes a workshop held in Budapest in March 2009 as part of the REVIVE project. The workshop aimed to provide guidance to practitioners in vocational education on selecting appropriate online tools to support curriculum redesign. It was structured around five pedagogical scenarios presented by participants. Hands-on activities allowed participants to experiment with tools like blogs, wikis, and search engines. The goal was to help educators design engaging, interactive online learning experiences for their own courses.
REVIVE project: workshop documentation
- 1. REVIVE workshop in Budapest, 8-9 March 2009 Documentation Welcome to the documentation of the workshop organized in March 2009 in Budapest as part of the REVIVE project. The workshop was addressed at academic staff and practitioners working in the sector of Vocational Education & Training and involved in the process of curriculum redesign. The aim of the workshop was to offer the practitioners some guidance through the process of the selection of appropriate tools to support the accomplishment of online activities planned as part of their courses. You can learn more about the context of the workshop, and the pedagogical, technological & pragmatic foundations in which it was grounded, reading - the project deliverable titled: “Harmonisation of pedagogical and technological methodologies for reviewing and reviving existing curriculum”1 or browsing through the workshop introductory presentations2. The aim of this short document is to give an idea of the workshop’s structure. It offers a short, guided tour through the collection of digital traces left by the workshop organizers and participants. The Moodle platform accompanied the workshop participants throughout and after the face-to-face training session. Basically, the participants had two types of presence: a traditional one (they were physically present in a seminar room) and a virtual one (they were logged in to the Moodle platform and to the selected social software tools). The Moodle platform was used for three different purposes: as a presentation tool, a tool to work with during the hands-on activities, and a single-point of access to all the workshop materials such as learning scenarios, presentations, descriptions of tools, tool usage scenarios and good practice examples. The whole training was structured around five pedagogical scenarios prepared by the workshop participants prior to the event: learning as an 1 http://www.reviveproject.eu/node/7 2 http://www.slideshare.net/askawild/revive-workshop-introduction http://www.slideshare.net/askawild/revive-pedagogical-methodology
- 2. individual, collaboration & collaborative writing, reflection on content & critical thinking, reflection on learning process, and communicating & discussing. Each scenario was presented as a separate topic, and all the topics followed a similar structure. Now, let’s have a closer look at one of the topics: Collaboration and collaborative writing (Screenshot 1). Screenshot 1: Topic 4. Collaboration and collaborative writing The topic starts with a presentation of a learning scenario for collaboration (Screenshot 1, no. 1) made by one of the project participants according to a template provided by the workshop organizers. Using questions as guidelines the participant describes an authentic learning scenario for her course (Screenshot 2). Screenshot 2: Example of a learning scenario for collaboration The presentation is followed by a plenary discussion about the kind of tools that students might need to accomplish this collaborative activity.
- 3. Next, the workshop participants are provided with an example of a similar learning activity accomplished by a group of students during the iCamp project trials. (Screenshot 1, no. 2). The application examples from the iCamp project constitute an important part of the REVIVE workshop. To facilitate the access to the dispersed artefacts created by the facilitators and students involved in the iCamp trials the workshop organisers set up a separate blog in Wordpress – a single point of access to a large collection of use cases and related artefacts (Screenshot 3). Screenshot 3: reVIVE blog You might find it useful to have a closer look at different cases presented within the reVIVE blog. Next, the participants are encouraged to try out some selected tools, (Screenshot 1, no. 3) in this case two different kinds of blogs: the Moodle blog, and Wordpress – one of the most popular blogging tools in the world of social software. Both blogs were made interoperable through a small plug-in developed within the iCamp project, the so-called FeedBack. The participants are divided into groups, each given a task to accomplish (Screenshot 4).
- 4. Screenshot 4: Example of a task designed for a hands-on activity with blogs All groups provide the solutions to their tasks in form of a blog post. Depending on individual preferences they post the answers either within the Moodle blog or in Wordpress (Screenshot 5). Later on during this hands-on activity the participants try out the FeedBack plug-in for their blogs: they subscribe to each other blogs to get regular updates, they read and comment on each others contributions. Screenshot 5: Example of a solution to a task designed for a hands-on activity with blogs. Finally, some other tools facilitating collaboration and collaborative writing, such as Google docs, Wikis and Doodle, are also introduced in this session. (Screenshot 1, no. 5). Additionally, at any point of time during the workshop the participants can access the descriptions of relevant tools accompanied by
- 5. the usage scenarios simply by browsing through the blog posts and wiki entries with help of tags (Screenshot 6 and 7). Screenshot 6: Revive workshop tag cloud Screenshot 7: Example of a usage scenario for Google docs provided as a blog post within the Moodle platform Now, let’s move to another topic: Learning as an individual (Screenshot 8). The aim of this topic is to encourage the workshop participants to give the learners more control over the learning process and learning resources. Within the Moodle platform the possibilities for students to upload and share their own learning resources are very limited. During this session the workshop participants learn how those limitations can be overcome with help of social software.
- 6. Screenshot 8: Topic 3. Learning as an individual First, the participants are introduced to the ObjectSpot search engine designed in the iCamp project to facilitate academic research. It realises federated searches over a large number of digital libraries and learning object repositories directly from the Moodle platform (Screenshot 9). Screenshot 9: ObjectSpot block on Moodle This is another hands-on activity – the participants are asked to use the ObjectSpot engine to search for materials related to their domain. Interesting resources should be added as bookmarks to the participants’ accounts in delicious and tagged with REVIVE. A very similar activity is done with blogs. The participants search for interesting blogs in the domain of their interest and paste the feed url to their freshly set-up Google Reader accounts.
- 7. Above we presented a small selection of topics and hands-on activities realised during the REVIVE workshop in Budapest. The workshop was designed to be highly engaging and interactive. It was structured around the pedagogical scenarios prepared by the workshop participants. This situated the learning experience in authentic problems and encouraged the practitioners to think “out of the box” while searching for the most appropriate tools to support the learning activities planned as part of their courses.