Universities and technology

David Lammy, the minister of state for higher education recently said, “Students are all on Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, i-Phones and
i-Pads for their social life and their university experience is still
divorced from that […] Universities have to be advancing technology.”

Our BA Learning through Technology (BA LtT) course is the latest evolution of the BA LTR that started back in 2003 it is fully online and designed to draw on this potential as will the Masters we are designing at the moment. In our online communities on a daily basis I see evidence that our BA LtT students are using these kind of technologies and a lot more. Some of our students use their iPhones as their main interface with the conversational aspects of our course logging into FirstClass Client via the iPhone app. I see discussions about places they go to shrink pictures, draw diagrams, make comic strips, animations, videos, design and conduct surveys, build whole websites or presentations, and I see the results when they bring the files into their online assessment portfolios. The outputs from online tools are becoming as common in assessment portfolios as the time tested MS Word and PowerPoint. As part of a module activity during the first semester on the course many of our students make a blog to use primarily as a reflective learning journal; some go on to use their blog to share their work in progress, gather peer review and to showcase their completed work. We have students posting videos on youtube as part of their peer review activities, posting presentations to disseminate their research online and gathering feedback data online.

Using these tools is no longer the realm of the techno-geek it is today's way of life for many. From where I am standing it seems that divorcing students' university experience from this world is to look at life through yesteryear's eyes. Universities who do not evolve to adopt this world might risk becoming lonely dusty hollow halls ..talking of which... on our course we don't use lecture theaters, we don't need need expensive flashy buildings with huge concrete footprints, students study from wherever they can get a phone signal or internet access - at work, at home, on the train, on holiday but never in a university building.