msdm: mobile strategies of display & mediation

My friends in the Learning & Teaching unit ( Ruth Brown, Helen George, Rob Kenny, et al) organised another informal network meeting, this time with HE Academy Pathfinder Project “critical friend” Grainne Conole. Grainne is professor of e-learning at the Open University, blogs at http://www.e4innovation.com/ and is “a critical but helpful friend to other academics struggling with uses of technology in their learning environments, through critically reflecting back on what’s happening to those involved with the Pathfinder project.”

From the many topics we approached, these made its way into my notebook:

1- the impact of technologies and particularly of social media in the learning environment:
- the change of academic roles
now that the academic role became so broad so elastic- involving so many different skills as mediator, technologist, networker, connectivist, in addition to pedagogue, lecturer, what does it mean to be an academic in the modern environment?
2-the challenges for student roles: how will they apply all the new skills they are exploring and developing whilst using their favorite social network sites to their academic learning?
3- the awkwardness of the institutional learning environments: that just lag behind students and teachers daily appropriation of read-write technologies for their communicative and creative purposes.
4- and the main challenge: how can we create links between what’s happening in the online informal networks and the monolithic blackboard that is still the dominant “VLE”?

In the end, Grainne promised she would have posted about the meeting by the end of the day, but I just checked and I’m beating her on this one lol