Pre Conference Workshops - Educating the Net Generation: The talk and the walk – Sharing lessons and resources from a Carrick / ALTC project

Objectives

This workshop aims to share with the ascilite community the activities of "Educating the Net Generation", a project funded by the Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 2006-2009. 

• Myth-busting: Participants will explore and discuss recent evidence regarding "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" in Australian universities.
• Design / debug education 2.0: Participants will explore and discuss lessons from the evaluation of a series of university learning activities that use web 2.0 for student-created content.
• Creating content for the academic community: Participants will explore and discuss further technical, administrative and pedagogical issues of social web computing, and use a selection of web 2.0 tools and sites to share their ideas.

Intended audience

Educators, developers and managers interested in undergraduate learning and teaching should attend.
Novices through to experts in working with educational technology will gain from this varied and interactive workshop. (Optional) Participants are encouraged to bring:

• a web 2.0 learning activity you are planning use or are already using with your students
• your wireless-internet enabled notebook computer, digital camera and / or digital voice recorder

Facilitators

The workshop will be facilitated by:

• Kathleen Gray
• Terry Judd
  

Details of activities

Hour 1. Busting myths about the Net Generation. Participants will:

• review the ideas of the key Net Generation commentators.
• explore and compare their own expectations and experiences of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants”.
• relate these to empirical evidence from a study of 2500 first year university students and 100 staff in 3 Australian universities in 2006.
• identify key implications for implementing new and emerging technologies in education and for undertaking research into learning and teaching with these technologies.
• have the opportunity to use data collection tools with which they can do their own further research into other university cohorts.

Hour 2. Designing / debugging Education 2.0. Participants will:

• review 2008 student and staff feedback on the use of web 2.0 tools for 8 different undergraduate learning activities, and study artefacts of 2008 student work.
• apply these evaluation findings to develop or revise one or more learning activities of their choice that involves student-created content using web 2.0 tools.
• have the opportunity to use planning tools and resources for educational design, technical specification, and learning management that have been developed and implemented in the Carrick / ALTC project.

Hour 3. Hands-on content creation. Participants will:

• be invited to create content reflecting their learning in this workshop, using a selection of web 2.0 tools, and share it via the online workshop site.
• be directed to a range of other web 2.0 forums and tools where they can interact about issues of education 2.0 within an academic community of practice.

Table 1: Outline of workshop resources and activities

Source	Toolkit of resources to be provided for use in the workshop	Potential workshop activities
Project Investigation stage	Key refs from literature review Data collection instruments Summary of student and staff findings Copies of our published papers	Rate the credibility of claims about the Net Gen Take the staff survey Predict how your students would answer the survey
Project Implementation stage	Findings from student and staff evaluations Project management and design templates Technical reviews of software options  for the technologies and tools we piloted Learning materials developed Artefacts of student generated content	Design and critique a student learning activity from pedagogical perspectives Identify academic admin factors to be considered, barriers, facilitators Q&A about student and staff engagement / feedback in the 8 pilots we ran
Project Dissemination stage	Online forum URLs and test sites	Try out the web 2.0 tools we chose Contribute to the workshop’s online forum Contribute to other web 2.0 forums for university staff

Table 2: Outline of 2008 pilot projects for reference in the workshop

Project	Tool	Subject / Level
Students sharing online resources through social bookmarking	Diigo http://www.diigo.com	Arts 1st year
Teacher provocateur and collaborative publishing through wikis	PBwiki http://pbwiki.com/	Psychology 1st year
Student-generated digital photo archive x 3	Flickr http://www.flickr.com/	Chemistry 1st year
	Sakai "Resources" tool http://sakaiproject.org	Biology 2nd year
		Education
Student reflective journals through blogs x 2	Sakai "BlogWow" tool http://sakaiproject.org	Education 3rd & 4th year
		Journalism
Student-generated podcasts	Problm (custom-built)	Medicine 2nd  year