This document outlines the original aims and approach of the LIN-R project, which sought to apply social networking and web 2.0 technologies to vocational higher education pedagogy using learner-owned technologies. The project targeted learners and teachers in creative industries who were assumed to be tech-savvy. Key findings included that the parallels between learning and web 2.0 activities were overestimated, and that assumptions about learning and teaching were often unreflected. Implementing radical innovations systematically created challenges, and creating a "strong" personalized learning environment required shifts across many interconnected areas.

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

2. 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

3. 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

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

5. 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”

6. 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

7. One key message
Context is king