3. Listening, reading and sensemaking (Making sense of course content) Communicating and community (Communicating with a group ) Searching and researching (Searching, evaluating and using online resources) Writing and speaking (Preparing oral and written assignments) Learning using online and mobile technologies
Technology use plays a central role in universities and colleges. We have written this book to help students through the maze, and we hope that those who teach them may also find it useful.
Most students make use of online and mobile technologies alongside their attendance at classes or tutorials, while others will study part time and sometimes at a distance. We come from different backgrounds: Linda works at a campus based university while I work at a distance university. But we have discovered that our students have a great deal in common.
What we do not do in this book is start with describing individual tools. Instead we decided to focus on what is known about effective learning in a variety of contexts, and we show you the range of online or mobile tools which can be used in each case. In the book we have divided the process of study into four closely related areas as we have illustrated here.
In this section we discuss the processes which students go through when grappling with course content and describe a range of ways in which technologies are deployed. For campus based students, online handouts or presentations, or podcasts before or after the lecture provide extra flexibility for students, and the chance to re-visit or repeat content. Other courses have taken a more radical approach, with more active approaches to sensemaking, using online activities, animations and simulations.
Technology has changed the way in which we approach writing tasks, and how we construct, share or edit. You can change your mind , producing multiple drafts, or reversion work which originally was written for another purpose. You can incorporate multimedia and other resources from a search on the web. You can share what you have written with fellow students, and get their comments. The book shows students some best practice.
We keep in touch with people much more readily and on a far more continuous basis than it was ever possible before, and also stay in touch with people who were previously unavailable. An online community can help for discussing the course, or to alleviate isolation and support motivation. It means that peer support between students is more important than it has ever been before.
With the ready availability of search engines; user generated content – not “kite marked” or peer reviewed Students often make use of additional web resources with variable results. Here we describe ways in which searching for online resources can contribute to study. We give some good practice guidelines for recognising useful sources and for approaching the task of effective paraphrasing, summarising and referencing, while avoiding plagiarism.
We were concerned to keep this book short and reasonably concise because hefty books can be expensive and off putting for students. But we do include many examples of further resources which people can explore, and we invite you to update the book website with new resources as you discover them.