It must be reporting season - in addition to the major "Social Media: State of the Art" report which we'll soon publish through the Smart Services CRC, two final reports from (what used to be called) Carrick Institute teaching and learning projects which I was involved in during 2007 and 2008 have been released recently. (The Carrick Institute has since been renamed the Australian Learning and Teaching Council.) I really can't take much credit here, though - my gradual and continuing transition to a very research-heavy workload has meant that my teaching activities have increasingly had to take a back seat. So, congratulations should go to:

As I've mentioned here before, over the last couple of years I've been one of the directors of a large teaching and learning grant project at QUT, aimed at introducing blogs, wikis, and other more advanced online tools into the teaching environment. Our fundamental assumption in this project is that in a social software, Web 2.0 world, students crucially need to build the critical, creative, collaborative, and communicative capacities (or C4C, for short) to operate effectively, whether in their working or private lives, or in their wider role as citizens. Advanced social software tools in learning environments can help build such capacities, or (where they exist already, as is increasingly the case) further enhance them by providing a more systematic approach to their development.

A little while ago Trebor Scholz suggested that I should respond to a post of his on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing-list, about using wikis and blogs in teaching. I finally got around to this yesterday, and thought I might post it up here as well. This also refers back to the interview Trebor did with me last year, and to the Large Teaching & Learning Grant project which I co-direct at QUT (see [weblink:166] for some more information). Any comments welcome!

Phew. More Drupal updates today, and I think I have most of it under control now. In the process I've added a Creative Commons licencing scheme, a blogroll, direct access to the content categories, and a few other goodies. Still no news on the monitored sites list (using Drupal's Weblinks module); I've manually added a list of sites to the right sidebar for the time being.

Other updates also continue. Today was the start of week three of semester, but I'm already having to update unit outlines for next semester (when I'm again teaching the Creative Industries unit at QUT, as well as New Media Technologies). NMT (in which students produce the M/Cyclopedia of New Media) still requires more development; I'm exploring ways to translate the wiki knowledge structure of the M/Cyclopedia into the unit content structure and delivery. How do you teach new media without falling into the trap of providing a simplified linear history of new media - how do you show the complex interconnected nature of new media concepts and issues instead (and enable students to explore them for themselves)?