Web-Based Tools for Teaching, Work, Study

Social software, software as a service, user-generated content, web conferencing, the staple tools of Web 2.0…  the explosion of possibilities in the last few years means we can now all use external software to do interesting things (in our teaching, our learning, our work here), often freely or cheaply. Thus, you have many more choices in the technologies you use, and an organisation like a University cannot hope to replicate the sophistication or rapid pace of development of some of the free or cheap tools now available.

Your own IT use then inevitably becomes a mixture of supported services offered within QM, discipline-specific or specialist software, and things you can access and are comfortable with that will do a particular job for you.

If that means we’re all now effectively our own IT suppliers, it’s of course easy to misstep.  You can land yourself with a heavy support burden, or engineering ever more complex human processes around the use of a particular technology.  Across an organisation there’s also a danger of duplication of effort and a wasteful proliferation of systems, so if there’s a suitable supported service available internally, it may be best (or required) to use it.  Otherwise, there’s plenty you may want to do that you can’t do with central systems, and we can help you navigate the world of unsupported but intensely useful web technologies.

Our approach to learning technologies is usually to talk about the problem or opportunity first, and to arrive at the tools later.  This is the ‘learning first’ dictum you find in (some) e-learning circles.  Indeed, you may find this list of diagnostic questions for e-learning useful if you’re considering using technology to address a particular educational need.

In practice, though, we often find a tool and think ‘that could be useful for x’, and the subject (the ‘e’ in ‘e-learning’, the ‘technology’ in ‘learning technology’) needn’t be completely buried by the method.  So, we try to maintain a list of useful tools that we’re aware are useful but don’t necessarily support ourselves, as a sort of ‘ELU recommends…’ reference tool, with the above caveats always in place.

Relevant Articles

This is a list of articles we’ve posted within this service area: