Learning Conversations

I recently revisited the term ‘bricoleur’ while reading Brown (2000). The metaphor seems most suitable for thinking about the type of new media activities some children are participating in. As well as reading, critiquing and listening to new media, these young people are typically creating, ‘mashing’, publishing and ‘talking around’ personally and culturally meaningful artefacts. In this sense, they become digital ‘bricoleurs’, developing an ability to find something and use it in a new way to build further unique artefacts they value. There are especially high levels of ownership with these media creations, and there is often a strong ‘re-mix’ culture, where young people re-use others’ artefacts and expressions (Hsi 2007). User-friendly and accessible collaboration tools, such as those found in Web2.0 spaces, enable young people to actively participate in tasks, giving them a ‘voice’ and a strong sense of audience as they explore, share and interact with others. Examples can be seen in the growing number of outlets for young people’s digital video creations. For example, their digital videos can be displayed to a wide audience using a variety of new tools (or see here ) or perhaps via local or more global contests.
Brown, J. (2000). Growing up digital: How the web changes work, education, and the ways people learn. Change, March/April, 11-20.
Hsi, S. (2007). Conceptualizing learning from the everyday activities of digital kids.
International Journal of Science Education, 29:12, 1509 – 1529
Image above made available under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Licence. Photo avaliable here.

One interesting aspect of the learning design field is the flexible roles of new media. Various genres of video, for example, offer exciting new opportunities for learning. Teachers may use or adapt existing footage in a range of ways from either commercial hosts such as Discovery Education or free libraries such as the Open Video project. For instance, video-based demos can be used as stimuli in POE designs or in many other ways. Burden and Atkinson (2008) are exploring a framework for using existing video from repositories such as the News galleries. An exciting part of their project is the creation of a community resource of focused and specialist exemplars. Teachers will be able to comment on exemplars and upload their own video in a Youtube-like community.

In terms of learner-produced video tasks, an exciting genre of video production that is enjoying widespread popularity in all levels of education is digital storytelling . For instance, student teachers at UTS recently made some powerful stories Such stories can either be published in user-created web2 outlets such as a class wiki or VoiceThread and/or can be published on existing media communities such as SchoolTube , TeacherTube or the Apple Student Gallery .

Burden, K. & Atkinson, S. (2008). “Beyond Content: Developing Transferable Learning Designs with Digital Video Archives.”. In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2008 (pp. 4041-4050). Chesapeake, VA: AACE

Made available under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Available here.

Just explored this commentary about educational YouTube videos … according to the blogger, there is ‘intelligent life on YouTube’! It seems that not a day goes past without hearing this type of hype about the Internet in 2008 … especially in relation to the quite exciting range of media freely accessible to teachers and students. Whether it’s the latest instructional video site, online video rental sites or YouTube collections, this hype seems easy to promote ‘web 1.0′ mindset of educational technology; a traditional ‘one way’, information delivery view of learning. In the case of video, this would involve the notion of learners passively viewing instructional videos. This is valuable of course but in my opinion, they ‘miss the mark’ in terms of the ability of web 2.0 technologies to support ‘learners as publishers’ and media creators. (Even on TeacherTube, there is only one channel devoted to student-generatated products!) Hence, it was refreshing to read Emma’s recent posting about the real affordances of Web 2.0 for children’s learning. She cites Freedman’s publication on Web 2.0 in Education (see paper in the Social Software folder in our Literature section), which contains many convincing and creative ‘case stories’ of teachers allowing their children to be creative with these new tools.

Image Source: http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/db/web2/

Prompted by a YouTube video, Shirley posts her thoughts on collaborative projects – a great focus for her work this week! Wikispaces OR a classs blog is a great way for kids in ’sister schools’ to share these kind of products, utilising the ‘comments’ feature for other kids to converse and critique (otherwise, try the new Apple Student Gallery).
Anothere exciting possibility is the collaborative (online) creation of artefacts such as video projects. For example, Jumpcut (yes, it’s free!) allows people to collaborativly build a video together, despite being in different parts of the world. A child-friendly version of such a facility will add an extra dimension to these types of collaborative projects.

Julie and Carly refer to the potential power of children as media publishers. It’s interesting when you look at a new site like teachertube that the major focus is on teachers as publishers (usually instructional material). For example, if you look at the channels available there, only one is devoted to student-generated products.