showcases

Node

Lisa Cluett and Judy Skene, University of Western Australia

details

The node.live showcase will engage with the issues relevant to the forum by:

addressing and highlighting the nexus between student learning (including pedagogy) and student engagement (including social and cultural issues)
demonstrating how non-Faculty staff (e.g. Library, Guild, international Centre) can create/enhance communities across campus using an online environment and how important these staff are in the student learning experience
showing what students write about and talk about that impacts on their learning and highlight how they perceive their learning experiences
demystifying some assumptions about students and ICT (by showing our survey results of first years students' expectations, access and experiences with ICT)
showing how the node.live site supports student learning in a range of ways (including discussing workshops, chatting to a Librarian, sharing exam strategies as well as giving advice on parking, IT, moving from the country to the city and finding the best coffee - basically anything that impacts on a students' experience and therefore their ability to engage and learn!)

The session will include a series of honest reflections on what happens when a new online interactive website is set up that any student can access. We'll explain a number of aspects of the project that will hopefully be relevant to both sectors:

How much it costs
How much staff time it takes
What the easiest and hardest parts are
What policy/legal hurdles we had to overcome
How to maintain a community once you've built one
What we would have done differently
Why we started on this rollercoaster in the first place
How staff have reacted to it