Comments on: Only 25% of students feel they are encouraged to use Web 2.0 features by tutors or lecturers

By: An Exciting Time | Brian Kelly Backup Blog

An Exciting Time | Brian Kelly Backup Blog — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:45:25 +0000

[...] then, do we have on student’s expectation of the Social Web? Via the eFoundation and Bridge to Learning blogs I read about the JISC Report on Great Expectations of ICT: how higher education institutions [...]

By: martinL

martinL — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:14:14 +0000

The reports sounds promising…
Unfortunately I made other experiences: We build open collaboration environments (based on drupal), we let the the students decide whether to blog with a specific blog on the platform or from their own, private Weblog (we aggregate the tagged content via syndication), we let them bring their own neewsfeeds…
But most of the students don’t have a weblog or don’t want to use it; don’t know what RSS means, see no sense in discussing in virtual groups (“we have use email”)….
I suppose there still is a problem of media-competency. The instututions have to deal with this (and set up courses like “introduction to ict fr scientific working”)!
Maybee this is just a german perspective/problem?!

By: Zolud

Zolud — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:24:38 +0000

Tutors or lecturers are 30 years older than students. How can thay encourage them in sphere that is not familiar to them?

By: Miikka Salavuo

Miikka Salavuo — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:22:42 +0000

Thank you for reporting this!

I think the link is http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/06/greatexpectations.aspx

My research and experiences with music students show that students quite often do use Facebook or MySpace, but only use them in fairly simple ways. When attempting to use similar sites, like Ning, in formal learning, they find those sites confusing. Most popular “Web 2″ services, such as del.ici.ous are quite alien, as are concepts like tagging. I have noticed the same trend in many of my studies: Students want to use their own services from their own basis. “If you build it they won’t come”, someone ones titled his article on this subject (lost it!). There is often a wall between formal and informal activities. So, statistics that show that students – at least music students – are active users of the Internet, do not necessarily mean that attempts to use social media in learning will be successful.

An online course I am just studying had a huge drop out rate due to the reason it required the students to be more initiative and self-directed than they have used to. But this could just be with music education students..