Sand-Pit event for practitioners on Web 2.0 tools for learning, led by national specialists.

What is a Sandpit event? Well, why should children have all the fun? Adults can do “learning through play” too, and that is exactly what took place when more than 30 teachers, lecturers and other learning professionals gathered at the Old Broadcasting House in Leeds on 24^th March to find out from the experts how Web 2.0 technologies could support and advance their teaching methods.

Two of the UK’s most influential figures in the field of Web 2.0 for learning, Josie Fraser and Jane Hart, introduced and provoked discussion on five key components of the Web 2.0 development: Micro- blogging, Social Bookmarking, E-safety, Wikis and Cyber- bullying and Social Networking. 

Jane’s introduction considered the reasons behind the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, explaining:

“Today’s learners are multi-taskers, they respond to the visual and they are social learners. To respond to these needs, teachers must facilitate learning rather than lead it.”

Josie guided the learners through the micro-blogging tool Twitter, which asks its users to sum up what they are doing in just 140 characters. Twitter has taken off in a big way in recent months, but educators are only just starting to explore how it might be used in a learning context. Josie's session set a debate raging as to the pros and cons of the tool, and how it might be used in teaching and learning.

Among the attendees were Dru Perrin and Jan Leatherland, who deliver e-learning courses at Sheffield College, from GCSEs to Foundation Degrees. Both were already using Twitter within a social context and the event helped them to realise new ways of incorporating the micro-blogging tool into their teaching. They explained,

“We use chat tools which encourage our online learners to discuss topics and share ideas. However, we want to make the systems already in place more fun and more efficient.

“Twitter is faster and a lot more fun to use. It’s been extremely useful to see how it works and how others are using it within education.”

Delicious, which is currently number one in the list of Top 10 Tools for Learning Professionals in 2009, was the example used to demonstrate Social Bookmarking. This is an excellent tool for sharing resources by building up an online reading list which learners and learning providers can add to.

The dangers that can arise from the changing technological landscape were explained in Josie’s informed run down on e-safety in which she covered the four areas of danger: Contact, Content, Commerce and Conduct.

Other websites and areas of interest that were explored included: The social networking site, Ning; Spokeo, a tool that scours all of the social networking sites for a contact in just one search and Etherpad, a wiki tool which makes it possible for numerous people to collaboratively produce one document simultaneously.

 

Feedback from participants at the event was universally positive, and the long reserve list of potential attendees who requested places after it was full, suggests a great deal of interest in this topic. Digital 20/20 will be looking to run another similar event in the autumn if funding allows. And modern technology allowed people who couldn't attend to be there virtually, with lots in interesting comments received during the day via Twitter (using hashtag #d2020w2) and a considerable audience watching the live video stream via ustream.tv.

One participant even asked presenter Jane Hart for her autograph (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3555/3385274565_3c5c9c074e.jpg?v=0), not for themselves, of course. The important outcome of this for Digital 20/20 is that there is now a cohort of teachers and lecturers in the region who understand how they might use Web 2.0 technologies in their work, and they are now out their spreading the word, engaging their colleagues, and, most importantly, engaging their students.

Let’s do this again soon.

Find out how Twitter is being used in teaching around the world: www.scribd.com/doc/14062777/Twitter-Handbook-for-Teachers