Cloudworks

Cloudworks - сообщество, в котором учителя обмениваются планами и сценариями образовательных практик

We have always recognised that different people will want to use a variety of different tools for designing learning activities in different contexts and at different stages of the design process, and that therefore the site should not be tied to any specific tool, but allow people a choice of formats for design (such as CompendiumLD maps, LAMS sequences and text-based formats).

These statistics are modest compared to those of the e-learning community formed around the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), and the number of objects and downloads are modest compared with Learning Object Repositories (LORs) such as MERLOT and ARIADNE. However, as an example of a website that integrates community and Learning Design repository elements, it illustrates new approaches to the sharing of educational resources and experiences.

The core object in Cloudworks is a ‘Cloud’, which can be anything to do with learning and teaching (a description of learning and teaching practice, an outline about a particular tool or resource, a discussion point). Clouds combine a number of features common in other Web 2.0 technologies. Firstly, they are like collective blogs in that additional material can be added to the Cloud - this appears as sequential entries under the first contribution. Secondly, they are like discussion forums - there is a column under the main Cloud where users can post comments. Taken together, these attributes mean Clouds can be ‘social’ which aligns with Engestrom’s (2005) notion of the importance of social objects as the key focus of social networks.

Литература

1. Galley R. et al. Cloudworks as a ‘pedagogical wrapper’ for LAMS sequences: supporting the sharing of ideas across professional boundaries and facilitating collaborative design, evaluation and critical reflection. Oxford, 2010.

Cloudworks педагогическая обертка для LAMS - системы управления образовательными практиками - сама по себе коллекция сценариев учебной деятельности не вызывает особого интереса учителей.

Само по себе представление сценариев образовательной практики не работает - необходимо представлять их как пример достижения конкретной цели

In our own work we have carried out a series of interviews with teachers and learning design workshops, to gain a better understanding of how they go about designing, as well as eliciting from them the kinds of support they would like to help them make more effective use of technologies (See Cross (Ed), 2010). Two key overarching responses from these interviews and workshops were that teachers wanted case studies of good practice (preferably in their own subject discipline) and a means of networking and discussing ideas with others. However our work has also shown that simply providing practitioners with case studies or design sequences ‘cold’ does not work, they need to be presented in a facilitative context – for example as part of a guided sequence of workshop activities towards clearly defined outcomes or as part of a facilitative online discussion. We have run variants of both of these contextualisation approaches within Cloudworks and see the work with LAMS sequences as a logical next extension. Our work within this context is around the notion of Cloudworks acting as a pedagogical wrapper around LAMS sequences. As part of this we intend to provide a template for this pedagogical wrapper to guide the nature of the online interaction.