Fear - by Mark Sun on Flickr (CC)

As part of our MSc we’ve had to read a paper by Guy Merchant (2009) on Web2.0, new literacies and the idea of learning though participation. We were asked to provide a response on it in a form of our choosing. I thought I’d have a go with Audioboo as I haven’t really had a chance to play with it.

You can read the paper here. It’s well worth it if you are interested in web2.0 and social networking for eductaion.

My response was just a quick thing about the relationship between participation and engagement on one hand and fear on the other and how it links to reading I did as an undergrad about fear (informed or otherwise) influences behaviour in real landscapes. The book was by Yi Fu Tuan and can be found here.

I don’t draw any radical conclusions as this was more a way of recording some thoughts.

PS – Sorry about the tag cloud – slight issues following updating the plugin…

Hello,

We collect a minimal amount of information about each student, which is held in the same type of secure database used for ecommerce websites. Access to this is limited to the small number of technical staff that are required to work on the project.

Thanks,

John

I sent a follow-up email asking if their technical staff were Criminal Records Bureau checked. I haven’t received a reply yet but will post it up when I do.

Am I being over-zealous about this?

A member of staff at one of our partner schools pointed this out to me today, so here it is: My Revision Plan.

It’s a free web tool for UK schools, specifically those running GCSE’s. Students and schools register to the site and it helps the students to structure their approach

I do feel a little uneasy that registration requires a student to identify their name, age and gender as well as precise school. There is a specific FAQ about schools’ data safety but nothing about students’. I’ve raised this with the site creators and when I get a reply I’ll do an update on the post. But it’s worth thinking about as an organisation if it’s unclear how a students’ data will be stored or used. It would also be useful to have more contact details for the organisation that created this but you have to dig around to find it.

Screen Grab

It looks pretty user-friendly, though. You enter in the details of the exams you are taking and assign importance to each one and after a few more steps it generates a timetable for revision activities (around your other activities). Have a look at the interactive tutorial for a fuller explanation.

The whole thing works best when the school actually registers and imports data from their Capita SIMS system (sorry SERCO users! You have to do it manually.) This automatically populates the students’ timetables with the exam timetable.

The website is asking for “appropriate” corporate sponsorship on the basis that it will be in daily use by students and so a good advertising channel. At least that makes it free at the point of use even if you disagree with a school-sanctioned system allowing advertising access to students. I can’t really see another way of making something like this free unless schools purchase a license.

What it won’t do, and it doesn’t try to suggest it can, is populate the timetable with juicy suggestions for how to revise, not just when.

I guess I see this being used by the sort of students that would have done something similar on paper in the past as there’s not really anything being added to entice reluctant revisers into it. There are other things you can do to encourage students to revise of which, more in a future post.

The other risk is, and I speak from personal experience here, you get a lot of students in August saying things like “I failed Physics? But… I did a plan! It took ages. It had colours and everything…”

…but no amount of online tools will save you from the Procrastination Pixie!

It sounds like I might have a downer on this. I don’t. Anything that helps students’ prepare more effectively is a good thing and this seems to be a good idea, nicely done. I m not suggesting either that there is anything dodgy going on regards the students’ registration data but at a time when we are encouraging students to think carefully about putting personal details online it would be nice to have some more details.