On a cold wet day in late January, a group of enthusiastic lecturers and academic support staff gathered in the warmth of the English department at Birmingham City University to discuss how to encourage student-centred interaction in online teaching. We were all interested in finding out some of the ways in which new online tools, such as blogs and wikis, social networking tools like Facebook and virtual worlds like Second Life are being used with students, and we weren’t disappointed! The day began with our host Ruth Page (Birmingham City), who talked about how her department used Facebook as a way to ease the transition into higher education for students (research shows that at least 65% of A Level students use the tool). A Facebook group was established and four existing students acted as mentors. Students used Facebook to discuss reading lists and the first-year timetable, among other things. Charlotte Carey (Birmingham City) talked about using the micro-blogging tool Twitter . Twitter is a social networking service that allows you to blog a 140-character message through a mobile device/web page to a user’s profile page (which may be on a mobile or on screen). We learned how this could be used to question an author, discuss a text or even create exercises like composing a 140-character story or poem. Chris Ringrose (Northampton) and Sonya Andermahr introduced us to their use of student reading diaries using the blog function within their VLE for a children’s literature course and a post-war and contemporary British literature course. To get students started, they work from a set of prompts (eg ‘reflect on last week’s seminar’). Tutor feedback is given via a short written response or a short recorded audio file. The blogs form part of the assessment for the course and encourage the students to engage with the material. Matt Gee (Birmingham City) showed us a prototype wiki annotation tool (Wiki Without a Name) developed in the Research and Development Unit for English Studies . A typical wiki interface is augmented by a ‘pop-up window feature’ that allows colour-coded annotations to be added (eg poetic structure etc). Any web resource can be linked to any annotation and, most interestingly, comments can also be added to annotations like a discussion thread. Derek Littlewood (Birmingham City) then demonstrated how he is using wikis in his Irish literature course and will soon pilot this new wiki tool with students. Finally, Ruby Rennie (Edinburgh) talked about how she has been using the Virtual University of Edinburgh’s (VUE) Second Life island to encourage student-centred interaction in the MSc in E-learning she teaches on. When three students from the English department at Birmingham City joined us for a breakout session, we had a chance to think about some of the barriers and solutions to using the tools we had heard about and gained valuable perspectives from them regarding the effectiveness of the new teaching approaches. Later, we split into a beginner and advanced group for a workshop on developing and using blogs and wikis. In the final session, we reflected on a worthwhile day, which generated many new ideas for classroom practice.
Brett Lucas, English Subject Centre
You can view many of the presentations in our online media player on our website in the Events Archive.
