LIN-R
Roger Rees, Ruth Catlow, Leonard Houx, Miles Metcalfe

Original aims
• Adapt and apply social networking and “web
2.0” to practice-based pedagogy
• Integrate institutional systems into the
technology students and staff actually use
• Incorporate the use of learner-owned
technology into the learning process (PDP)
• Ways to understand extra-institutional versus
institutional systems through the prism of a PLE

Our audience
• Learners, teachers, and learning support - in
a specialist vocational HE institution serving
the creative industries
• Learners are 18+, career-focused,
motivated within their own discipline -
communications or design
• We assumed they’d be pretty tech-savvy

Approach
• User-led
• Small-scale
• Loosely-coupled
• Take a cross-college unit
• With a view to wider embedding

Findings and issues
• Parallels between learning and “web 2.0”
activities can be over-estimated
• Deeply-held and un-reflected upon
assumptions about learning and teaching
• Issues don’t reside neatly in the technical,
pedagogical, institutional or social domains
• There are a lot of myths about the “netgen”

Findings and issues
• Problems: top-down, technology-led, design-
intensive
• Paradox - you can’t be told to be radical
• Attempts to innovate systematically encourage
understanding but create challenges to
implementation
• “Strong” PLE - pedagogically desirable but
requires shifts in many interconnected areas,
technical, pedagogical, institutional, and social

One key message
Context is king