Carmen HOLOTESCU Politehnica University of Timisoara Manager Timsoft

Gabriela Grosseck West University of Timisoara Romania

World Conference on Educational Sciences, North CyprusFebruary, 4-7, 2009

USING MICROLOGGING TO DELIVERONLINE COURSES

CASE STUDY

AGENDA:Presentation Agenda:•Microblogging technology

•Microblogging platform Cirip.ro

•An online course

•Conclusions

RSS/blogs-2004, podcast–2005, vlog–2006, video–2007, microblogging-2008

Web2.0 / social networks have great impact

in collaborative / social learning ( eLearning2.0 )

Microblogging is a collaborative technology, a new form of blogging, with brief text updates of 140 characters, via Web, SMS, email, IM or 3th party applications - RT interactions between users

photo: http://www.heikkironkko.com/images/yolehti_jaiku.jpg

The best known microblogging services

Educational uses:•information and knowledge management

•courses enhancement

•delivering entire online courses

•collaborative projects in universities

•communities of practice

•ePortfolios.

Cirip.ro - a microblogging platform specially designed for education and business; launched in March, 2008, by Timsoft

Personal Learning Environments / Networks of users

Cirip.ro special features:

•public and private groups (courses, projects, events, different topics)

•multimedia objects embedding in notes: images (flickr, tinypic), audio (deezer, vocaroo) and (live) video clips (youtube, dotsub, vimeo, seesmic), presentations (slideshare, capzles, voicethread, flowgram, photopeach, notaland) documents (pdf, doc,xls)

•feeds monitoring (from sites/blogs/social networks/search).

Users

GroupsFeeds Networks

of

Edu-Resources

PLE/PLN: users, groups, feeds

Interactions online, via ciripfox, SMS, mobile, IM, (MMS), API, twitter2cirip, rss2cirip

Text messages, images, audio, video (live), presentations, files

Profile

cirip2twitter, widget, export notes,

Group news:

announcements

materials as LOM/SCORM objects

An online course about microblogging platforms

Investigations:

•integrate microblogging with other Web2.0 technologies

•microblogging platform as LMS

•course facilitation

Course elements:

announcements

materials as LOM/SCORM objects

collaborative exercises

multimedia messages

built PLE / PLN

Collaborative exercises using different Web2.0 technologies:

•puzzle images/digital storytelling

flickr, CC

•del.icio.us collection

•video translation - writeboard, dotsub

•comments on voicethread

•tagcloud - wordle

•code of good practices on microblogs - writeboard

Conclusions:

• Cirip.ro has facilities to deliver successful and qualitative online courses and to enhance courses; the communication, authoring, monitoring, statistical facilities make Cirip.ro a modern free LMS.

•Facilitating an entire online course or a part of a course on such a platform requires specific facilitation skills, and collaborative technologies knowledge.

•Participants gain important digital and communication skills, build PLE / PLN, continue to collaborate in community

Future work:

• Tags will be implemented to classify notes and to organize the group messages in topics defined by the facilitator.

•Authors intend to develop a specification for evaluating students’ eportfolio and participation in courses run or enhanced by microblogging.

•Scenarios for using microblogging together with different collaborative technologies in formal and informal courses will be modelled using Educational Modelling Language.