Lisa Harris Marketing

I am participating in an online course run by Alec Couros called Social Media and Open Education. The plan is to blog the highlights on a weekly basis. The course starts today (well, actually “today” is really 2am tomorrow because Alec is based in Regina, Canada). The good news is that the weekly sessions are being recorded on Elluminate and so they can be viewed at a more civilised hour.

More good news – there is a course blog, a wiki, slides posted in Slide share, readings posted on Delicious, and comments and announcements on Twitter. Thankfully, much of this material is pulled together on a Netvibes page.

To obtain credit for the course, you need to register at the University of Regina. Informal participation is free, and so far nearly 200 people have signed up from around the world. You can see the full list (complied using the TweepML listing service) here and here

So far I have simply completed the week 1 reading and videos. The highlight was a video of a presentation by Michael Wesch titled “A Portal to Media Literacy”. It is rather long (over an hour) but Michael is an engaging speaker who hits the viewer with a barrage of facts. The first 25 minutes are particularly useful. I jotted down a few key quotes:

“Helping students create meaningful connections is what learning is all about.”

“You are in the same boat as your students – we are all stupid in this environment. It is a place to experiment. “

“We cannot assume students are media literate” (which certainly endorses our own experience)

Michael’s central message is that digital media destroys many traditional principles of education, for example that information is hard to find, that knowledge is about acquiring information, and that authorised information should not be challenged. By persisting with this model beyond the end of its shelf life, Universities now face the dissatisfaction highlighted so well in A Vision of Students Today Instead, he proposes a new model – take advantage of developments in technology to “harness, critique and create something new”.

So, lots of food for thought. Next step – I’m now going to check out http://diigo.com (adding post-it notes to web content) and then the recorded Elluminate session in the morning