2012 - 2014
EU - Lifelong Learning Program - Leonardo da Vinci
Lena Lohrmann
The Learn2Teach project aims to establish a new communication and collaboration paradigm in teaching and learning through the vehicle of social media.
Whilst technology itself cannot teach, the Learn2Teach project can assist the process of learning through the design of pedagogical approaches to the embedding of social media, providing a far reaching interactive social community that can promote creativity, peer discussion and collaboration.
The project aims to enhance learning by empowering teachers to utilise these innovative teaching tools, which will in turn foster inclusive learning by engaging and motivating learners previously resistant to technology, by disguising these tools as student driven individual constructivist learning techniques, preparing them for their social, economic and political contexts.
Creation of the Curriculums: "Learn2Teach by social web".
The project aims to exploit the specific potential added pedagogical value of social media for school teaching purposes. It will provide a set of pedagogical materials to meet the challenges and opportunities of social media for teachers and learners. The first product will be a self-study curriculum that new teachers can use to take advantage of the pedagogical potential of social media for constructivism inspired teaching. At the same time teachers will train themselves in the use of the web 2.0 as an innovative working, communication and learning paradigm and also train students on how to use social media whilst being aware of its pitfalls (e.g. data privacy). A central objective is to assure the sustainability of the project outcomes by establishing a pedagogical support network of schools to foster the use of web 2.0 for teaching purposes. The network will facilitate the further development of the curriculum after the lifetime of the project.
The curriculum will be developed cooperatively within a wiki by teachers from the participating schools, using social media tools. It will be published after it has been tested and improved in a pilot phase. The pilot testing will take place at the world’s largest ICT fair, the CeBit in Hannover, Germany, which supports the project. New teachers from the partner schools will study the curriculum and use this knowledge to develop a joint presentation by students from six partner schools at the CeBit. The preparation and wrap-up of the CeBit visit will take place through the use of social media.
The project idea is based on a specific approach to social media as a “social innovation” rather than a technological one. The social innovation is seen in the support of “user generated content” – a paradigm that can change the way people communicate, work and learn. Examples of applications that foster the production of user generated content are wikis, blogs, communities (eg. youtube) and mobile services (eg. twitter).
Common, distributed and incremental working of a curriculum with a wiki.