Week 2a - Activities 1 and 2

Activity 1 and 2 notes are here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfjp86bs_89txxt3fcv

Activity 1 - watched a web cast by John Seeley Brown http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?whichevent=1063&s=31

Debate about participation being the most successful way of learning. Very engaging webcast. I get the message from Brown that group work is about helping the learner to understand the knowledge that has been given to them before the group learning takes place; so having only watched to 13 minutes I would say that no he doesn’t devalue reading/viewing/listening alone, the message I am receiving is that you need both. I liked the iceberg metaphor, the tip being the explicit learning (reading, listening etc) but the mass of the iceberg under the water is the social learning where you become to understand the knowledge in your own context.
This extract of the video has really helped me to understand better why we encourage our students to be members of study groups and use the discussion boards. I could use this information to help in the process of encouraging this to take place more. I can transfer the ideas about the architects lab and you learn by teaching, to the discussion forums for the DLMBA. We are also looking at moving away from a face to face induction for the DLMBA so the idea of using Second Life for the social side of the induction day is interesting to me.
found his style very easy to watch and listen too. Much more engaging to me than the Rowlands screencast from Wk 1 Activity 6. The use of video in this presentation really did add something to the experience – but when you have a more engaging and lively presenter that is bound to happen.

Actiivity 2
Learnt about citizen science and citizen journalism.
Citizen science is a term used for projects or ongoing program of scientific work in which individual volunteers or networks of volunteers, many of whom may have no specific scientific training, perform or manage research-related tasks such as observation, measurement or computation. The use of citizen-science networks often allows scientists to accomplish research objectives more feasibly than would otherwise be possible. In addition, these projects aim to promote public engagement with the research, as well as with science in general. Some programs provide materials specifically for use by primary or secondary school students. As such, citizen science is one approach to informal science education.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science)
Citizen journalism, also known as public or participatory journalism or democratic journalism[1], is the act of non-professionals "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,"
Heat magazine gets people to send in "spotted" messages when they spot a celebrity in public, these are then printed in the gossip pages.
BBC news often ask people to send in photographs of their local area to contribute to the delivery of news stories (E.g. pictures of snow, floods, etc)
Mark Glasser, a longtime freelance journalist who frequently writes on new media issues, gets to the heart of it:
The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube.