Learners promoting change

Recently I blogged two posts about Student Voices and how learners are bringing their own technology into the classroom to enhance and extend their learning experiences. They use Twitter backchannels and hashtags to track the conversation around their learning, and also connect with others beyond the classroom walls to continue discussions around the content they are learning. They collaborate more, and create their own content on blogs and videos, and are generally becoming the 'nodes of their own production.' The videos accompanying these posts also reveal student concerns over traditional methods of teaching and learning, and a significant shift toward more autonomous, proactive and collaborative learning approaches. Education is changing, and it appears that many of the important changes are being instigated by the students themselves.

Below is the third short video that features in my BETT Show Higher Education Summit presentation. It features some of my second year students talking about innovation and change in Higher Education. I asked the students to tell me what they thought they could personally do to influence how universities work. Some students set up their own learner group Facebook pages, so that they can communicate to each other more easily and regularly on course related issues. Facebook is a more familiar place for students to engage in a forum, and they find it easier and more convenient to use than the institutional systems such as university VLEs or e-mail.




Learners promoting change by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.