'Learn with Maggie' - a great case study

[Gabi Witthaus]

To Maggie and community members

I have been working with SAIDE (SA Institute for Distance Education) on developing an open educational resource for distance educators called 'Supporting Distance Learners in the 21st Century', over the last several months. I've just added a short description of the 'Learn Web 2.0 with Maggie' community site as a shining example of how to support learners through asynchronous communication on the Web :-)

You can find the case study here - please reply to this blog posting if you have suggestions for improving it! (Please also note that the SAIDE resource is still work in progress and contains some incomplete sections.)

Thanks Maggie - and keep on doing what you're doing!

Gabi

[Gabi Witthaus]

Hey Maggie, thanks for the super-quick response! It's great to have your comments - so glad you liked the unit. Yes, please please please give us some ideas on making it more visual. In Unit 3 for some reason I was visually inspired and there are quite a few pics - it would be fantastic to have more.

Sorry I won't be able to tweet with you on Fri morning :-( And much as I'd absolutely love to meet you f2f, I'm based in the UK these days, so we'll have to make do with virtual chats for now... (Maybe on Skype?)

And... thanks for tweeting about the site :-)

[Maggie Verster]

Hi Gabi,

Wow, you have made me look with new eyes at the network!!! Just a little more background. I mainly started out using the Ning network as an example of all the main social media tools and as teachers just had to register once, it really worked well for live workshops with the added advantage of making ongoing learning relationships last longer. Then I decided to see how it could work for informal but organised online "un-workshops" and it was kind of a disaster!!! The social networking side of things made it very difficult to keep everybody focussed but as quite a few people formed ongoing learning relationships using the tools, I consider it to be an "educational" disaster ;-) I think the main point is to try and find the right tools for the right purpose to support ongoing learning. Using social media in South Africa is still very new and scary and we are taking little steppies at a time....

I have created a learning ecology at www.mathsliteracy.co.za for maths lit teachers and it has shown a growth of 128% in the last year and is starting to move into a more sustainable phase of a community of practice- ity is also a ning with diigo as resource database. You can download my paper about it here: http://emerge2008.net/presentation/item.php?item=connecting%20communities/Online%20Learning%20Ecology
I am busy updating my data and there are some encouraging signs that teachers are starting to reflect and they are definitely sharing more resources...

As for this network- I am just playing around and fiddling and has on purpose left it totally open and informal....

I love your whole unit and am really proud to be in it. Thank you!!! I would love to get together and chat about it- maybe I can help you to put more visual elements into it? I am a visaul learner see ;-)

I am in Bloem at the mo at the Amesa conference and will be doing a workshop on Friday morning (8-10) on how to use social media in the maths class and for ongoing PD - it would be cool if you can pop in via twitter??? www.twitter.com/maggiev and my hashtag for this week is #amesa2009

I have twittered your resource and as it is OER (love you love you love you) will be piloting it here and there and sending feedback to you ........... I think it is pretty much ready for un-veilment!!!!

I will be back in Joburg in 2 weeks time - me must do a f2f!!!!

Maggie