by Christian Dalsgaard
March 17th I gave an interview on learning styles to TV2 / Østjylland. In the interview I express some of my criticism of the theory. The interview was motivated by an initiative of the municipality in Aarhus (of about 7 mio. kroner) in support of learning styles in the public school.
You can see the interview here.
I have written the paper “Touch the World - and communicate the experience via Mobile Phones” (pdf) together with Jørgen Bang, Kristian Engelbrecht, Rolf Lemminger and Thea Skaanes. The paper was presented at the 3rd WLE Mobile Learning Symposium in London. The abstract reads:
“The paper presents a project involving school children’s use of mobile phones at Moesgaard Museum, in Aarhus, Denmark. A special anthropological exhibition called “Touch the World” is arranged around items supplied by UNESCO. The paper will discuss the pedagogical perspective of using mobile phones as a vehicle to enhance pupil’s learning by making their own documentation of their experiences and by communicating these experiences to fellow pupils. We argue that mobile phones have a potential to support these learning processes as a personalised tool for documentation and communication.”
Together with Elsebeth Sorensen I have written the paper “A Typology for Web 2.0″, which was presented at ECEL 2008 (the The 7th European Conference on e-Learning). The abstract reads:
“Web 2.0 is a term used to describe recent developments on the World Wide Web. The term is often used to describe the increased use of the web for user-generated content, collaboration, and social networking. However, Web 2.0 is a weakly defined concept, and it is unclear exactly what kind of technologies it covers. The objective of the paper is to develop a typology that can be used to categorize Web 2.0 technologies. Further, the paper will discuss which of these technologies are unique to Web 2.0. Often, Web 2.0 is described by way of different kinds of software; for instance, blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, and social networking sites. The problem with this type of description is that it fails to distinguish between different types or categories of technologies. As an alternative, the typology developed in the paper distinguishes between technologies on basis of, how - and in which contexts - they are used. In a given use context, it is not the technological characteristics themselves that are interesting. Rather, it is the function of the technology in a given learner empowered use context, which calls for specific characteristics that appear significant in the coupling of action to process. The typology suggested by this paper relates to four functions or use contexts, which are believed to be central to the potentials of Web 2.0: dialoging, networking and awareness-making, creating and sharing.”
