REVIVE workshop in Budapest, 8-9 March 2009

Documentation

Welcome to the documentation of the workshop organized in March 2009 in

Budapest as part of the REVIVE project. The workshop was addressed at

academic staff and practitioners working in the sector of Vocational Education

& Training and involved in the process of curriculum redesign. The aim of the

workshop was to offer the practitioners some guidance through the process of

the selection of appropriate tools to support the accomplishment of online

activities planned as part of their courses. You can learn more about the

context of the workshop, and the pedagogical, technological & pragmatic

foundations in which it was grounded, reading - the project deliverable titled:

“Harmonisation of pedagogical and technological methodologies for reviewing

and reviving existing curriculum”1 or browsing through the workshop

introductory presentations2.

The aim of this short document is to give an idea of the workshop’s structure.

It offers a short, guided tour through the collection of digital traces left by the

workshop organizers and participants. The Moodle platform accompanied the

workshop participants throughout and after the face-to-face training session.

Basically, the participants had two types of presence: a traditional one (they

were physically present in a seminar room) and a virtual one (they were

logged in to the Moodle platform and to the selected social software tools).

The Moodle platform was used for three different purposes: as a presentation

tool, a tool to work with during the hands-on activities, and a single-point of

access to all the workshop materials such as learning scenarios,

presentations, descriptions of tools, tool usage scenarios and good practice

examples.

The whole training was structured around five pedagogical scenarios

prepared by the workshop participants prior to the event: learning as an 1http://www.reviveproject.eu/node/7 2 http://www.slideshare.net/askawild/revive-workshop-introduction http://www.slideshare.net/askawild/revive-pedagogical-methodology

individual, collaboration & collaborative writing, reflection on content & critical

thinking, reflection on learning process, and communicating & discussing.

Each scenario was presented as a separate topic, and all the topics followed

a similar structure.

Now, let’s have a closer look at one of the topics: Collaboration and

collaborative writing (Screenshot 1).

Screenshot 1: Topic 4. Collaboration and collaborative writing

The topic starts with a presentation of a learning scenario for collaboration

(Screenshot 1, no. 1) made by one of the project participants according to a

template provided by the workshop organizers. Using questions as guidelines

the participant describes an authentic learning scenario for her course

(Screenshot 2).

Screenshot 2: Example of a learning scenario for collaboration

The presentation is followed by a plenary discussion about the kind of tools

that students might need to accomplish this collaborative activity.

Next, the workshop participants are provided with an example of a similar

learning activity accomplished by a group of students during the iCamp

project trials. (Screenshot 1, no. 2). The application examples from the iCamp

project constitute an important part of the REVIVE workshop. To facilitate the

access to the dispersed artefacts created by the facilitators and students

involved in the iCamp trials the workshop organisers set up a separate blog in

Wordpress – a single point of access to a large collection of use cases and

related artefacts (Screenshot 3).

Screenshot 3: reVIVE blog

You might find it useful to have a closer look at different cases presented

within the reVIVE blog.

Next, the participants are encouraged to try out some selected tools,

(Screenshot 1, no. 3) in this case two different kinds of blogs: the Moodle

blog, and Wordpress – one of the most popular blogging tools in the world of

social software. Both blogs were made interoperable through a small plug-in

developed within the iCamp project, the so-called FeedBack. The participants

are divided into groups, each given a task to accomplish (Screenshot 4).

Screenshot 4: Example of a task designed for a hands-on activity with blogs

All groups provide the solutions to their tasks in form of a blog post.

Depending on individual preferences they post the answers either within the

Moodle blog or in Wordpress (Screenshot 5).

Later on during this hands-on activity the participants try out the FeedBack

plug-in for their blogs: they subscribe to each other blogs to get regular

updates, they read and comment on each others contributions.

Screenshot 5: Example of a solution to a task designed for a hands-on activity with blogs.

Finally, some other tools facilitating collaboration and collaborative writing,

such as Google docs, Wikis and Doodle, are also introduced in this session.

(Screenshot 1, no. 5). Additionally, at any point of time during the workshop

the participants can access the descriptions of relevant tools accompanied by

the usage scenarios simply by browsing through the blog posts and wiki

entries with help of tags (Screenshot 6 and 7).

Screenshot 6: Revive workshop tag cloud

Screenshot 7: Example of a usage scenario for Google docs provided as a blog post within the Moodle platform

Now, let’s move to another topic: Learning as an individual (Screenshot 8).

The aim of this topic is to encourage the workshop participants to give the

learners more control over the learning process and learning resources.

Within the Moodle platform the possibilities for students to upload and share

their own learning resources are very limited. During this session the

workshop participants learn how those limitations can be overcome with help

of social software.

Screenshot 8: Topic 3. Learning as an individual

First, the participants are introduced to the ObjectSpot search engine

designed in the iCamp project to facilitate academic research. It realises

federated searches over a large number of digital libraries and learning object

repositories directly from the Moodle platform (Screenshot 9).

Screenshot 9: ObjectSpot block on Moodle

This is another hands-on activity – the participants are asked to use the

ObjectSpot engine to search for materials related to their domain. Interesting

resources should be added as bookmarks to the participants’ accounts in

delicious and tagged with REVIVE. A very similar activity is done with blogs.

The participants search for interesting blogs in the domain of their interest and

paste the feed url to their freshly set-up Google Reader accounts.

Above we presented a small selection of topics and hands-on activities

realised during the REVIVE workshop in Budapest. The workshop was

designed to be highly engaging and interactive. It was structured around the

pedagogical scenarios prepared by the workshop participants. This situated

the learning experience in authentic problems and encouraged the

practitioners to think “out of the box” while searching for the most appropriate

tools to support the learning activities planned as part of their courses.