COMPARACIÓN DE LOS DIBUJOS INFANTILES

Higher education institutions, in particular, are starting to offer social computing tools within their virtual learning environment with the aim of creating research and learning communities in a more informal manner. The underlying objective is to establish social networks within the institution, which improve the communication among participants, offer assistance, orientation and support, and ultimately enhance learning processes by creating a positive working atmosphere. While knowledge exchange might take place within these networks, the main focus lies on creating an environment of understanding and assistance.

The University of Brighton, for example, set up “Community@Brighton”,85 _{a social}

networking system for students and staff, who are using it as an online social community for shared academic interest, personal development planning, and for the creation of e-Portfolios. Students are also able to incorporate material from other social networking platforms such as MySpace. All course cohorts are automatically added as communities, though students and staff are free to create their own communities, which many of the student societies have done. New forms of student support are provided by students or student services responding to students who blog about problems with their studies.86

Similarly, the University of Leeds (UK) uses Elgg to build a community of staff and students based on the creation of personal and community blogs.87 _{“Connect”, a more recent initiative at}

the University of Westminster, “is a pilot project

85 http://community.brighton.ac.uk/.

86 Cf. Franklin & van Harmelen, 2007; Childnet International, 2008.

87 Cf. https://elgg.leeds.ac.uk/; http://www.lts.leeds.ac.uk/elgg/.

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to create a social network for students and staff at the University of Westminster - a democratic space where you can blog, share files and videos, meet new friends and talk about your life and studies”.88 _{Here a more encompassing system,}

including different social computing tools, is envisaged.

Networking also offers opportunities for vocational training, providing peer support for students during intern- and traineeships. Within the EU-funded Socrates-Minerva ESMOS project, for example, a group blog was employed among a group of students from the BSc Adult Nursing degree at the University of Salford during their practical internship in the UK and abroad. The aim of the blog was to nurture an online community of practice which would enable geographically dispersed students to discuss and reflect on their placement learning experiences, offering one another feedback and sharing key observations. The preliminary qualitative evaluation indicates that the student-tutor and peer-to-peer communication via blogs is an effective way of enhancing academic, practical, social and psychological support, particularly for those students who travelled abroad for their clinical placement. As these students became more psychologically stressed, their regularity of posting increased. The blog was additionally used as a collaborative bibliography and a reflective ‘space’ for the group, who also uploaded their final seminar presentations so that other members of the group could ask questions and provide feedback (cf. Keegan, 2007).

Another example of the use of social computing tools for vocational studies is the Elkonet89 _{virtual learning community (cf. Heid}

et al., 2009), which started in 1999 as an

online learning platform for vocational training and further education. It gradually extended implementing new features and Web 2.0 tools. It is currently moving from a collection of isolated

88 https://connect.wmin.ac.uk/. 89 http://community.etz-stuttgart.de.

tools towards an integrated solution. Since 2004 discussion forums support learner interaction in a blended learning approach and recently a wiki, blogs and social bookmarking have been added. The aim is that learners mutually extend and share their knowledge even once they finish their course of study. In this way, not only there is an established peer-to-peer social network, but there is also an emphasis on life-long learning opportunities. This integrated learning environment fosters collaborative content production while giving learners an active role in up-dating and improving material or providing new resources.

The networking potential of social computing is of particular importance for teaching practice and teacher training. Over the last couple of years, many networks have been set up with the aim to increase collaboration and knowledge exchange among teachers, which in turn enhances their teaching skills, enriching the their didactical, methodological and pedagogical skills, and subsequently promoting institutional innovation from the inside.

As one example, the EUN eCLIL community90

is a European virtual community among science teachers to share ideas and materials, exchange experiences and promote the use of English as a common language. The aim of this community is to exchange experiences in teaching science subjects using English as a working language, or language of instruction. Teachers will develop CLIL materials and lesson plans, share them with the other colleges, and have them tried and tested with their own students. Similarly, the eTwinning Teacher Blog,91 _{while employing a blog}

environment, is at its core a social networking site where teachers in Europe can discuss their experiences with eTwinning programs, exchanging experiences.

90 http://community.eun.org/entry_page.cfm?area=1912. 91 http://blog.eun.org/etwinning/.

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Among teachers’ virtual communities, LeMill92 _{(cf. Heid et al., 2009), stands out for its}

international and multimedia-centred approach. This project offers the creation, collaborative development and sharing of teaching multimedia resources, covering discussion and sharing of materials, methods and technological tools. It is a free and open web service with open- source software that can be used by anyone and is customisable, hence answering teachers’ needs to find free multimedia, interactive and adaptable material. LeMill is a very successful initiative where no points for improvement have been highlighted. The key success factors of the initiative can be found in the simplicity of user interface and in the adaptation of the platform structure to users’ demand.

Some services focus on help, advice and peer support rather than subject oriented knowledge exchange. The “Classroom 2.0” site,93 _{for example,}

is a social networking site for teachers, offering help and advice with online tools and access to Web 2.0 tools for learning; discussion forums offer opportunities to exchange views and experiences. The network currently comprises 8520 members worldwide. The German “Lehrerforum”94 _{uses a}

more traditional forum-approach to build a network of peer support around common – often social, psychological or legal – problems encountered by teachers in their daily lives. Talkabout Primary MFL,95 _{started in the UK in 2007, is a social}

network run on Ning for people teaching, or considering teaching, foreign languages in primary school. It is a place to share worries and successes with supportive colleagues.

Other initiatives concentrate on setting up collaborative knowledge repositories that enable teachers to exchange learning material and mutually extend their didactical and methodological resources. The German ZUM-

92 http://lemill.net.

93 http://www.classroom20.com. 94 www.lehrerforum.de. 95 http://primarymfl.ning.com.

wiki project96 _{for secondary schools teachers}

employs a wiki to allow teachers to collect ideas, materials and links for education, creating a resource that is permanently kept up-to-date and can easily be extended. The Glarnerschulen wiki97 _{is a collection of learning material and}

ideas, edited in form of a wiki, to which anybody can contribute. Targeted at teachers in training, the Share project,98 _{a multilingual exchange}

and collaboration platform initiated by the University of Cologne (Germany), encourages the sharing, collaborative production and re- usage of educational materials. Several tools are offered to support teamwork, collaborative writing, copyright handling, and open content. A document repository, open to all interested teachers, is provided. Similarly, the Icelandic “Wikilessons” project99 _{comprises a collection of}

over 100 wikilessons written by teacher education students and their instructors.

In all these cases the technological innovations supporting networking are taken a step further by engaging learners, teachers in social communities with a common interest or objective. These online communities lead to new collaboration modes, transcending institutional and geographical barriers. Communication and collaboration in these communities transform the way in which information is exchanged and learning material is generated, allowing learners and teachers to actively engage in the development and transformation of learning content.