Abstracts
The Chemistry Flickr Project
Tuesday 5 May 2009, 1600 - 1630
Presenter: Peter Tregloan
The University of Melbourne, VIC
Presenter Biography
Peter Tregloan is an Associate Professor in Chemistry at The University of Melbourne. He has held the positions of Assistant Dean and Associate Dean (IT and Multimedia) in the Faculty of Science, and Chair of the Teaching and Learning (Multimedia and Educational Technology) Committee of the Academic Board at Melbourne.
Abstract
This paper presents a case study of the implementation of a learning activity for a cohort of approximately 1000 first-year Chemistry students at an Australian public university, involving the use of student-generated content using the Web 2.0 social filesharing application, Flickr. The learning design includes students tagging with student-generated folksonomy, posting academic descriptions of their content and ranking shared files.
Recent NMC / Educause ‘Horizon Reports’, identifying emerging technologies that are likely to have impact on teaching and learning in higher education, anticipate user created content and social networking technologies to be on the nearest horizons. The Flickr project sits in the context of a suite of ‘Net Gen’ projects at Melbourne, that include podcasting in medicine, wikiwriting in psychology, social bookmarking in arts, plus pilots from two other universities.
First year Chemistry at Melbourne has a ‘traditional’ subject structure, consisting of large group lectures, laboratory classes and problem class tutorials - each strongly supported by online line learning resources. The Chemistry Flickr Project was one of four ‘independent learning tasks’, introduced in 2008, to be undertaken by each student throughout Semester 1. It provides opportunity for a different student view of their experience in the subject. The objectives that set the framework for the Flickr activity included:
- to make connections between the chemical world that students experience and the topics presented and discussed in Chemistry 101,
- to record some of these connections using their own camera or camera-phone, and then upload images to a shared subject group website and add some notes,
- to share their observations of chemistry in their world with other students in the class,
- to learn from other students’ observations by reviewing what they have found, photographed and uploaded, and nominate some good examples of other students’ work,
- to broaden students general IT literacy and skills with technology, and
- to develop students’ own abilities to plan and execute a short but complex ‘open ended’ task.
The result of our first Chemistry Flickr implementation is a database of over 1900 images created, tagged and reviewed by the student group.
A full survey of the student cohort who were part of this Semester 1 2008 subject is now underway, however, the 10 students who provided feedback in a focus group in the last phases of the activity reported that the Flickr project did support their learning and allow them to make connections between their study and everyday life. The students who volunteered for the focus group provided generally more positive assessments than the 42 students who responded to an online survey. This suggests that students with more negative feedback feel more comfortable sharing this anonymously online, rather than confidentially and face to face.
Building from our experience with this first implementation, the Flickr activity will be a continuing feature of these large chemistry subjects. This paper will report on the educational rationale and design of the learning activity, the technical and administrative preparation that was required and the formal evaluation of the project.
