Student presentation at WestCAST 2009 at the University of Victoria.

Over the last 50 years there has been a proliferation of New Literacies including visual, computer, media, information, digital, web, and information communication technologies (ICT) to name a few. Each New Literacy adds to the palette of human interaction, and build upon existing literacies (Woolsey, 2005). However, this is a subject whose terminology is quite confused (Bawden, 2008). What does literacy mean in the 21st century? What are ICT Literacies? What do New Literacies have to do with teacher education? In this presentation, I will discuss the development of an ICT Literacies model and its implications for pre-service teacher education.

Target Audience: Both seasoned and new Program Administrators

This session is designed for both beginning and seasoned program administrators who are interested in learning how the delivery of a course, lecture, academic session, or journal club in their residency program may be enhanced by the use of technology. It will begin with an overview of common approaches, potential issues, and opportunities when blending face-to-face with online instruction. Attendees will be introduced to popular tools and basic steps in setting-up a blended environment. Following the presentation participants will engage in a facilitated discussion focused on how these approaches and tools could be incorporated into their own context.

Learning Objectives:
Upon completion of this session participants will be able to:

• describe the use of common tools in blended learning environments
• discuss issues and opportunities when using technology to enhance a program
• outline an example, from their own context, where they might consider using technology to enhance the delivery of a part of their program

The rationale for #TvsZ is simple; we call it the “perforated classroom” mode of teaching and learning. In this era of information abundance and fast-changing socio-economic paradigms, both students and teachers require new and different skills. Students need to learn to contextualize ideas through efficient web-enabled research practices, to share their results through effective multi-modal communication, to discover new resources and connect to emerging networks of experts as they prepare for lives which may require many transitions among fields. Teachers need to learn to model these these skills by interacting with students as curators of information and connected, public co-learners. The perforated classroom thus embodies these various methods of connection, while also enriching the possibilities of teacher-student, student-student, student-community, and student-teacher-community-global rapport beyond the classroom itself.

This presentation will focus on #TvsZ 6.0’s cycle of collaborative development, focusing on the value of social networks for instructor collaboration, and sharing our experience of a cross-border, cross-institutional, and cross-cultural collaboration between teachers and students, from game host & student perspectives. By exploring a few of the media objects created by game participants, we will also discuss various methods for evaluating the outcomes of student, teacher, and community peer-learner collaborations. Each step of development and implementation exemplifies a stage in the digital fluency that the game promotes by involving people in the fun and frenzied creativity of participation, by inviting participants to collaborate and co-learn techniques of multimodal media creation, by tempting collaborators to become partners in the management of the game during gameplay, and by player-partners becoming hosts and hackers of future iterations of the game itself.

This workshop will invite participants to explore the pedagogical value of perforating oneÍs classroom: opening it up for students to learn with others online in loosely facilitated social media experiences. The seven international collaborating facilitators will share their experience of co-facilitating an open online game. The facilitators, who teach in Egypt, Canada, New York, Georgia, and California, will share their cross-institutional, cross-border experience of hacking #TvsZ and playing it with their students.

#TvsZ is an open online Twitter game played across an increasing variety of online sites and apps. The game, created originally in 2012 by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel, is usually played over 3-4 days by anyone who chooses to follow the Twitter hashtag #TvsZ, as well as students in participating classes. Players, who are often meeting virtually for the first time, interact with each other on Twitter via a basic game dynamic which encourages informal, spontaneous tweets relating to the game premise. As players develop increasing familiarity with other players and with the basic syntax of game tweets, additional game dynamics are introduced, often in response to player suggestions and initiatives. These additional dynamics encourage players to create a wide variety of media objects, to experiment with new modes of networked collaboration, and to refashion their roles in the game itself.

Our workshop will be experiential: one must play the game to get a good sense of how and why one might want to hack it. Workshop participants will play a short version of one of the #TvsZ games and brainstorm their own forks of the game, and discuss possible repercussions of various modifications to such a game. They will also discuss possible pedagogical benefits to including a game like #TvsZ in their curricula, as well as potential problems one might encounter when doing so (and how such problems might be addressed).

This introductory session to the use of social media in medical education asked participants to:
– Discuss the role of social media in Medical Education
– Take the first steps to engaging with the participants in the room and a wider networked community
– Discuss common pitfalls and barriers to using social media tools and strategies to mitigate these

In this panel discussion, several designers, ABE subject matter exerts, course facilitators, and participants will share their experiences from this service-learning project. Through prompted discussion, the panelists will contemplate how well this open service-MOOC model supported both professional development via open education, as well as OER development and use for an adult basic education audience. MOOC design and facilitation issues (including costs, learner feedback / guidance, and assessment) and OER design and development topics (such as authoring and quality / evaluation) will be considered.

A unique aspect of this service-MOOC was the design and facilitation of the course by an all volunteer team of professional instructional designers and adult basic educators. Starting in the fall of 2015, volunteer designers and subject matter experts in ABE spent 13 weeks designing and developing the course. Another team volunteered for 12 weeks as the course facilitators. In total, these professional educators and instructional designers volunteered over 1,000 hours to design and facilitate this service-learning experience. A conservative estimate of the professional services donated by the volunteers who designed and facilitated this course exceeds $50,000.

The OER was designed and developed using Open Author, an online authoring tool on OER Commons. The instructional materials each MOOC participant developed incorporated all necessary content presentation, learner practice, and assessment materials for 15-30 minutes of instruction, as well as guidance for instructors regarding use of these materials. Upon successful completion of this project-based course, participants earned an Instructional Design Service Badge and Certificate of Recognition.

This session will include representatives from the Distance Education Unit, Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning, and the Library to discuss how support units at the U of S can assist instructors and students interested in working with open educational resources.

Are you interested in adopting open textbooks and other open educational resources? Have you found resources you would like to make changes to? Have you found an open textbook you would like to enhance by contributing your own resources? Do you have questions about technology tools that support your open education vision? If you answer yes or maybe to any of these questions then you should participate in this session! You don’t have to be a technology wizard to use or create OERs for your course, and this session will highlight tools to help us with our open education endeavours.
Full presentation available here.