E-learning and Digital Cultures 2011

The format for our interactions over the coming two weeks is a series of tutorials (in Synchtube and then Twitter) around a film festival, pieced together from interesting short films and classic clips on YouTube and elsewhere. All these engage in some way with themes emerging from the readings, and your brief is to tease these out a bit in discussion, extend the thinking and get familiar with some of the theory. So please do the readings first, or at least alongside, viewing the movies.

How does it work? We’ve sourced a collection of films and extracts which we’ve loosely clustered around the themes of ‘dystopia’, ‘other worlds’ and ‘being human’. There will be two ‘real time’ tutorials offered in Synchtube in weeks one and two, to get us started, and then three tutorials in Twitter (‘twittorials’ : )), each taking place over several days, and each focussing on one of these themes.

Synchtube
Holding a couple of short tutorials in real time gives us a chance to meet as a group, do some socialising and (text) chat about a few of the films. Synchtube adds a text chat facility to any YouTube movie, enabling us to watch and talk at the same time. The Course Guide has more detail on how to use Synchtube – basically just by clicking on the link below at the set time. Take time to sign up first. We are offering two half-hour Synchtube tutorials in the hope that most people will be able to make at least one of them. Just enter the Synchtube space at the right time, sign up/log in and you are ready to go!

Twitter
For the remainder of this section of the course, we will discuss the films asynchronously in Twitter. Just watch the films over this period as detailed below and tweet about them as you go. When you tweet on the movies, remember to include the course hashtag #ededc. Using Tweetdeck or something similar will make keeping track of the tutorials easier – the Course Guide and Technologies Handbook has more on this.

And remember to feed your tweets into your lifestream, or they won’t count towards the final assessment.

For each tutorial, you can recommend your own movies too. Nominate your own by tweeting them.

Here’s our timetable of movies and tutorials. Any queries, make a comment on this page or ask your tutor.