To what extent should our longlasting courses be augmented with contemporary, perhaps short-lived, content and/or external references?
Some time ago I made a short post about bookmark management in the context of links provided from within course materials, as well as those recommended via ROUTES.
In my experience, the ROUTES resources tend to be largely static - in the case of T396, the original links were selected several years ago. Including longliving, archive quality links is an important feature of ROUTES, but as a consequence there is little opportunity to refer students to timely, or currently newsworthy, sites.
If we take the view that are courses are constructed so as to be wholly self-contained, as well as being rigorously structured, then we are likely to be wary of encouraging students to bolster our course materials with information from sources we haven't selected. This goes against the model of learning we base the OU teaching approach on, however. To simplify somewhat, students are not seen as empty vessels into which we can pour educational content; rather, we assume that our materials support students as they construct their own understanding of the principles we aim to teach them.
An important step on the road to effective learning is the ability to evaluate relevant sources of information related to the topic being studied, along with being able to assimiliate information into a wider understanding of the topic at hand. If our students completed our courses without the ability to go on learning about that particular subject area, we would be failing them.
To support students in their individual learning journeys it may be that we should be providing them with resources that contain fluid information in addition to the fixed knowledge resources that are embedded into a course during its production )and that are intended to remain in the same form for the lifetime of the course).
I would briefly like to consider two possibilites:
1) The provision of news headlines relevant to a course embedded in the course web pages;
2) The provision of a social, course specific bookmarking facility akin to ROUTES.
Relevant News
Adding relevant news to course webpages can be achieved by publishing content taken from an RSS feed from a reputable source. The BBC Backstage initiative is currently allowing users to republish BBC material in their own webpages, which suggests that we might make (re)use of BBC material to provide a Relevant News Headlines link table in our course pages. At the moment, the BBC do not provide RSS (i.e. directly reusable) feeds from their search engines, but this will either be made available in a matter of time, or someone will start archiving news stories and producing their own search feeds (for example, you can search the Today archive here ).
Social ROUTES
The idea behind Social ROUTES is to allow students to bookmark sites of interest using an in-house variant of the del.icio.us social bookmarking tool. Students would be provided with their own customised bookmarklets that would allow them to easily bookmark a page and automatically tag it with the course code, along with any other meaningful tags the student desired.
Displaying bookmarklets from all users on a particular course will facilitate knowledge sharing across the course cohort.
Additional administrative tags recording the presentation code might also be added automatically by the bookmarklet tool, thus allowing students (or the course team) to filter results by presentation.
Capturing knowledge about sites relevant to a course that are frequented by siginificant numbers of students on a particular course may provide course teams with information about areas where the course materials are lacking (for example, if large numbers of students are bookmarking online tutorials on particular topics). In addition, the bookmarks may also identify candidate sites for inclusion in the less fluid ROUTES database.
Finally, the evolution of folksonomies around sites tagged for a particular course may identify conceptual or thematic issues identified from the students point of view, thus helping course teams to come to a better understanding of what messgaes and ideas the students are themselves taking away from a particular course.
I hope to be posting more on Social ROUTES in the next couple of weeks, possibly with a demo or two...
Posted by ajh59 at June 7, 2005 11:38 AM