Thursday, September 11, 2008

Constructing Courses to Enhance Learning

I thought I would start today while my ideas are fresh thinking about the design of my course and my developing ideas.

I have talked about my theoretical perspective on the wiki as been the social and situational orientation. I believe it is important that the students are given chance to reflect on their practical experiences to allow deep learning to occur and to make sense of their practical by linking it with theory. One of the ways we do this at present is by asking the students to construct a portfolio. However this has difficulties in that not everyone is able ot articulate their learning in writing. The other problem is consistency, as the students will usually work with 2 different lecturers in the course who have different ideas as ot what they like in the portfolio.

An idea is forming in my mind to look at the use of e-portfolios so I'll do some research on this. I'm also very interested in setting up a journal for each student in a course wiki in moodle. This course wiki will also have a wiki for each different ward in the hospital that the students work in. The students will be asked to contribute at least 2 times to the ward wiki. This means throughout the year each ward will have a resource which has been set up by the students and will help all students who end up on that ward.

If I was to introduce this I would need a to give a lecture on how to use wikis and e portfolio's and I'm thinking camtasia might be a good resource for this..... Any way this is just a quick note on my developing thoughts and I will be adding more as the ideas evolve...Cheers! have ot go and deal with kids!!!