Our Moodle site

I just wanted to show you a screenshot of our Moodle site, since it is a very central part of the course we are doing. Apart from the weekly seminars in videoconference, and as part of the seminars, we have spent quite a lot of time putting together this "virtual seminar room" where we have put all the textual resources we need (and more), we have the weekly schedule with pdf files of the texts we are discussing, an image collection, powerpoints, and the web2.0 solutions we use on a weekly basis to assist students in colaborating on ideas and small projects relating to the seminars, such as conducting a forum discussion about types and functions of memory, and this week, the students are working on a blog (see link to the left) recording their interests in and findings of local, national and global sites of memory that correspond to the "England, England" heritage park we read about in Julian Barnes's novel. If you would like to visit our Moodle site, please send me an email, and I'll tell you have to find it.

Course in the air and flying

We are now just about four weeks into the course, and though we have had some difficulties, such as this week's snow that stopped the heartbeat in London, and some intital pressure on getting the hardware up and running, I think we can comfortably say that we are having a good deal of fun engaging in these trans-national seminar sessions.

Initially, well I guess still, I feel like an old man shouting on a mobile phone in a public space when speaking in the videoconference seminar - which is, of course, not necessary, since both the video and audio goes through very well. I guess it just takes some time getting used to. One of the UCL students noticed one thing that makes a videoconference seminar different from a regular seminar, apart from the obvious fact of us only virtually being in the same room, that we seem to formulate ourselves more carefully when speaking "through the wall" - we noticed that the individual contributions are very thougtful and more consciously responsive when doing a seminar this way. I had not thought about this, but I think it actually hightens the level of reflection and active contributions to the seminar sessions.

The best thing about the course is, I think, that we have an excellent group of students with just about 6 UCL students and 3 Danish students. Most of the UCL students are volunteers and are only auditing the course which doesn't leave them enough time to engage as actively in our students led group work sessions during the week as they would have liked, but here, fortunately, the Danish students are extremely active and make good use of the Moodle site we have created for the course. Read more about our Moodle site elsewhere on the blog. You can also see a photo taken by David of our videoconference setup seen from London. I wonder how it looks from the Danish side?

As you can see in Davids photo, we have set up our tables in a regular seminar fashion with a wideangle camera in front of us and a multi-directional microphone on the table. On the screen to the left we have an image of the Danish seminar room, and to the right we have an interactive whiteboard where we share a screen (using a NetMeeting application that allows us to shift control of the board). In the photo we can see ourselves on the whiteboard, but in the seminars we have our Moodle site there, a powerpoint, pictures, pdf files of texts or websites that we are discussing in the seminar. We still need the assistance of our technician in Aarhus, Michael, to set up the communication, but it looks really intuitive and I think we, Svend Erik and I, could manage all of the tech ourselves. I'll try to get more photos of our setup and some more precise technical stuff up on the blog soon.

The Dawn of the Cyberstudent

I found this interesting article from the Guardian's Education section on "The Dawn of the Cyberstudents". I think it puts the "method of delivery and learning" that we have adopted in our course into perspective.

The heading says: Colaborative Learning, wkis, virtual classrooms: web2.0 is transforming higher education, and students are driving the changes. Can UK institutions keep up?" Read the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/universitychallenge/cyberstudent

Let me know what you think?

Pointers

Friends,

In the spirit of getting to know each other's individual interests in the subject at hand, I would like to draw your attention to the work of one of my favourites, the American philosopher Daniel Dennett (pictured). Here is the transcript of a significant and accessible talk Dennett presented in 1992, on the mechanics of memory. I can't gauge how relevant this rather technical and basic epistemological discussion will be to our endeavour but I think it could be comforting as a solid basis from which to digress into the more abstract trains of thought that literary-minded people tend to end up following. Dan Dennett is an exceptionally gifted speaker, so I'd also like to point you towards a lecture on consciousness he delivered more recently as part of TED, here. TED, for those who haven't come across it, is perhaps the most bookmarkable address on the net. The most inspiring lectures by some of the world's most accomplished speakers are archived there. It's a profound database of audacious ideas worth visiting regularly.

See you next week,

David

We hear you loud and clear

Hi Everyone,

Here's the image I took with my computer during our second (my first) session. I thought the Aarhus assembly might like to see what it looked like from the UCL side.

David

UCL checks into our virtual classroom

A few days ago we had our first local meeting here at UCL, and we are all looking forward to meeting the Danish participants the coming week. Three out of the seven students met in the Access Grid studio (Diana, Natasha and Elena), and I think we all agreed that this is going to be quite an unusual and fascinating learning experience for all of us - we have been hit by some sort of malignant virus here in London, and we hope to have a full team ready to meet, virtually, the three Danish students (Lene, Christian and Jacob) and Svend Erik on Monday in our first video conference. You will soon be able to "meet" all the participants on the Moodle site.

As a way of introducing the course, I talked a bit about the rationality behind it; and we discussed what it might ad to the course that we conduct it across national borders, why are we using Moodle, hypertext and other WEB2.0 technologies as central tools in the course? One of the more complex and experimental issues is, of course, how the format and technologies of the course will feed-back onto the theme, Memory and Literature in a Globalised Culture. Will we, for instance, at the end of the course, be able to determine whether or not the transnational and hypertextual format of the course and its products will influence the way we think about memory?

We wont have time, I am afraid, to continue the discussion we had on some of the "memory images" we have collected in the Moodle database: the Lukasa, Luba Memory board, and Saxgren's photograph of a native-american Dane, wearing traditional costume in the midst of his Danish domestic setting, but we already took some steps towards exploring the mediated, encoded, nature of cultural memories, and the fact that heritage and cultural memory translate, in interesting ways, into other cultural settings - I am sure this discussion will continue with other materials in the weeks to come.

I am looking forward to meeting the rest om my UCL students and, not least, our Danish collaborators - I am certain we will have many transnational memories to share as the course unfolds.

Moodle site under construction

The Moodle site to be used throughout the seminars is being constructed these days. Material, links, instructions, requirements and the weekly program will be availabe shortly. But some of the links are active now. As soon as the Danish students have received a UCL-mail address they will be visible as active participants.