Frances Bell’s Blog

On Tuesday afternoon, I attended the short paper session on Learning and Internationalism. Alannah Fitzgerald presented the first paper, Social computing and the microcredit activities, brought to our attention by Professor Yunus, 2006 Nobel prize winner. Learners are exposed to examples provided by the Overcoming Poverty network, tagged and aggregated via the Suprglu Web 2.0 service (expecting to use additional technology in future). Alannah drew out the strengths “ meets community needs, hypermedia facilitates blended learning and info discovery, inexpensive; and weaknesses - requires self-motivation, minimal guidance can lead to weak forms of constructivism, hypermedia can clutter information processing.

Karen Robinson then presented our paper How can learning technology make a world of difference? Karen set the context for her study, increasingly global and culturally diverse learning environments, increasingly employing information and communication technologies.  Karen presented some interim findings from her research that revealed the diversity of learners’ responses to technology-enabled learning.  It must have been very nerve-wracking for Karen to present in a large venue, but I was really pleased by the number of questions, indicating the interest that her presentation aroused, and her responses to them.

George Roberts and Graham Attwell presented their short paper (that had been rejected as a symposium) as a speed symposium, through youtube videos they and their co-authors had made.  They used images and concepts to characterize communities, identifying key issues  “ heterogenous similarity and bounded openness”.  George asked where the international boundaries are drawn in Emerge. The next example examined the existence of Community of Practice in World of Warcraft, deriving indicators from Wenger’s work.. He concluded that CoP did exist in WoW.

Lastly Tore Hoel explored existence of community in a Norwegian elgg implementation where differences were exhibited in terms of blogging experience, level of commitment to the community.