Well, I haven’t managed to locate a recording of Grainne’s talk yet. In fact – this is an open question for anyone who can answer it – is there somewhere on the CCK08 site where all past recordings are stored? If there is, I haven’t yet managed to find it. It would be useful to be able to return to some of the presentations.
In the absence of having heard Grainne – I have read her papers and had a quick look at the Cloudworks site.
I have to say that I’ve got my doubts about how successful this site will be and I’ve been trying to sort out why I’ve got this ‘niggly’ feeling about it. The site looks great and doesn’t everyone want and need access to ideas for their teaching?
If I have understood this correctly, then the idea behind this is that people socialise and share around an object. We see this in Flickr (photos), Youtube (videos) Slideshare (presentations) – incidentally, I really don’t like slideshare much, but that’s another story – so the idea behind cloudworks is that people will socialise and share around ideas for teaching.
As I see it, Flickr, Youtube and slideshare work well because they share ‘finished’ objects. People don’t have to do anything with the photos, videos and presentations – only enjoy and appreciate them. Whereas an idea for teaching is of absolutely no use unless you do something with it and without the sharing of that process, then I think a resource of teaching ideas is of limited use.
I might have missed this, but although I can see the possibility for commenting on the teaching ideas uploaded onto Cloudworks, I can’t see any discussion possibilities. Of course, Grainne might have explained this is her talk (which I haven’t heard) or it may be that you have to be signed up to have access to discussion – but without the discussion I’m not sure how successful the site will be.
It seems to me that Cloudworks needs to incorporate both the sharing of objects idea from Flickr etc. and the sharing of discussion from social networking sites such as Facebook. Each teacher’s context is so individual that whilst a resource of teaching ideas can be a help and time saver, the resource still has to be adapted for the individual context and I suspect that’s where most of the help is needed and those are the ideas that most teachers would like to interact around.
Jenny Connected 