Tuesday 16th April 12.00 – 13.30 Cantor 9228

Dr Mira Vogel, Education Developer, elearning Environments, University College London

Social learning is an important aspect of the move from didactic to more constructivist approaches to learning. Well-conceived group work promises to contribute to the graduate attributes agenda, bring personal contact and companionship to courses, and provide forums for students to negotiate new understandings in their subject area. However, creating conducive environments, activities and ethos for group work is neither intuitive nor straightforward, particularly when the group work is expected to coalesce in a shared object such as a wiki or blog. Pitfalls include bargaining (cooperation without collaboration), ‘social loafing’ and its counterpart ‘diligent isolation’, difficulties maintaining awareness, disorientation, and evidencing and recognising members’ respective contributions. Over the course of this interactive workshop participants will consider the requirements for what Graham Gibbs terms a ‘healthy learning milieu’ for groups, and design a group task within this scenario. For the purposes of the session we will take wikis as the site of collaboration, but the principles we draw upon will have wider relevance on and offline.

There is no need to book but it would be helpful if you could email j.cawkwell@shu.ac.uk if you would like to attend.