proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING

M
Pete Nevin
October 10 at 8:46pm
Hi M
We have a project to design and make a drawing machine over the next two weeks. You could
design and invent a fantastic machine like those that Heath Robinson designed. You should think
about the machine like something you buy at IKEA with all the diagrams of construction. Use
your imagination. And don’t worry.
Pete
This rapid communication has advantages over the traditional university systems of phones or
meetings. The phone can be intrusive and would certainly impose on my private life at evenings and
weekends, but Facebook allows me to choose when to communicate. Face-to-face meetings require
appointments that are often difficult to fit in at short notice. But by regularly checking the Facebook sites, I
can deal with things swiftly and quickly. Students appreciate the swift response and they can see that we
care. And I feel that this is an important part of student retention. Pastoral as well as academic tutor support
is improved. I can see people saying “Dont you find this is an imposition?” but it only requires you to
restructure your work patterns a bit. If you didn’t want to be as available as I do, you could chose to say
“I’m on Facebook at these times”. But we are often at our computers at work and the conversation on
Facebook is often fairy brief. ‘Chat’ sessions may be longer, but still not time-consuming. The ‘chat’
function can be extremely useful and a good example of this is a student going into his final year suddenly
had a job offer and was really unable to make up his mind and needed guidance. Using ‘chat’ I was able to
give that guidance immediately. Certainly, it could have been done via a phone call, but in these
conversations actually writing can help to clarify thoughts and understandings. Unlike a phone call, too,
you can keep a record of the conversation when you need to.
Security is a topic that always comes up when discussing Facebook and, yes, I’m sure there are
unscrupulous people out there that misuse it. One point is that I am using something that the students
already use and where the norms of use are already established. I have come along after, so to speak, and
said “Lets use this because they are already there”. But I do ask everyone to make sure they do the privacy
settings properly and I tell them such things as the attachments for ‘poke’ and others are not absolutely
secure.
You have to be aware of the copyright implications, too. We avoid people losing the rights to their
work by making sure that they only post photos and not full scans of the work. I am careful about what
goes on Facebook and that’s why the students have set up independent blogs for their main works and not
put them on Facebook.
X’s Wordpress Weblog entry:
I am unsure what the issues are on music about the U.S Laws as on One True Media, they have
this link to music where you can add these samples (like in this movie). As this is just a first edit,
there is no writing yet. ...
Facebook communication:
Student Y
October 16 at 11:57pm
Hi Pete.. I am concerned as I did not hear the conversation concerning the Laws on music on
Youtube. I have had many troubles over Jump cuts, so have been frantically figuring out One True
Media. I then had my own WMA sound files, but as I cannot (and will try to convert to) MP3
format, this was unsuccessful. So then I saw they had music on a menu, and had these samplers...
Do you know (or will I have to research this?) as to whether this would infringe the copywrite for
Youtube?
Conference proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING overcome barriers of Life-Long learning?” 203