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Tech Report kmi-97-13 Abstract


New Media, New Practices: Experiences in Open Learning Course Design
Techreport ID: kmi-97-13
Date: 1997
Author(s): Tamara Sumner and Josie Taylor
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We explore some of the complex issues surrounding the design and use of multimedia and Internet-based learning resources in distance education courses. We do so by analysing our experiences designing a diverse array of learning media for a large scale, distance learning course in introductory computing. During the project, we had to significantly rethink the design and production of our learning resources as we shifted from a paper-based teaching model to an interactive teaching model. This shift entailed changes to our design products (to promote more effective media use by learners) and changes to our design practices (to foster consistent media use and design across a large and distributed team). Course designers and course students alike needed help in breaking out of paper-based models of learning to obtain maximum benefit from the interactive teaching model.

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To appear in: Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI '98), Los Angeles, 1998.
 
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Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.