Gavin Sade (aka g1, g!) is an educator, researcher, and designer in the field of interactive computational media. He is currently teaching within the faculty of Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology and also working towards his PhD. The PhD is titled “Envisioning our cybernetic environments” and aims to develop a reformulated understanding of cyber-ecologies and design specifically focusing on ubiquitous human technology interfaces. Gavin has a passion for distorted electronic highly mediated, plundered, digitally fragmented re.visions of our post human neo-cyberpunk future, which can be explored via his weblog.
Weblogs as Open Constructive Learning Environments
This paper presents the authors experience using weblogs in a final year Communication Design class entitled Contemporary Issues in Design and Technology, at the Queensland University of Technology in the Faculty of Creative Industries. Students in this class actively contributed to a weblog for the duration of the semester, with this activity being integrated into both formative and summative assessment. The experience provided a range of insights into the weblog phenomenon.
This paper will explains the purpose of the class, and why the weblog was selected as a suitable online environment for student activity. The experience resulted in a number of observations that have lead to the development of current approaches to using weblogs in learning and teaching. Finally the paper suggests that the focus on providing centralized web services to support activities like blogging, may not be ideal for the purposes of creating authentic learning experiences. It advocates that such learning experiences are best achieved within a ‘healthy’ Information Ecology (Nardi and O’Day), or learning blogosphere (Gibson), grounded in a constructivist pedagogy, and where there is recognition that information systems are not value neutral.