robert fitzgerald, phd

Stephen Barrass and I have just had our paper, Social Software: Piloting MyToons As A Digital Learning Community For Teaching New Media, accepted for Edmedia 2008 to be held in Vienna, Austria later this year. The abstract follows:

This paper describes a pilot project using the MyToons.com animation social networking site to teach a New Media unit at the University of Canberra in 2007. MyToons, modeled on MySpace and other popular social software sites, has additional characteristics that focus on the construction of social identity and peer networking. The location of MyToons in the public space beyond the classroom embeds the students in an authentic community of practice, with exemplars, technical support, and opportunities to network and showcase their creativity and productions. In this study we reflect on the process of integrating MyToons into the unit syllabus, and the results from an evaluation survey of the students. This analysis confirms the importance of usability and sociability for the creation of an online community of practice for peer learning.

Our symposium went very well with lots of comment and discussion. We played with the format of the session a bit and asked each presenter (Sebastian, Me, Kai, Scott, Brian & George) to only give a punchy 5-8 minute (instead of 15-20 min) overview of their work thereby giving us over an hour of free-flowing audience discussion. Brian has posted extensively about the symposium here, Kai posted notes here and George also commented with a few general reflections on the conference here.

I am leaving for Vancouver this Friday to attend Edmedia. We have a poster presentation on our Carrick project work, a paper on some work we did a few years ago on the use of integrated learning systems in Australian schools, and a really interesting symposium with a very international group of colleagues including George Siemens (University of Manitoba, Canada), Scott Wilson (CETIS, UK), Sebastian Fiedler (Centre for Social Innovation, Vienna), Brian Lamb (University of British Columbia, Canada) & Kai Pata (University of Tallinn, Estonia). I haven't actually met any of these folk before though I am certainly aware of their work. My contribution to the session is: "Beyond the LMS: What's the BIG idea?". More on this later.