"Technology assisted learning"

The subject line is in inverted commas because I have a lot of sympathy for people who are quite sceptical from the point of view of all learning is technology asssisted in the modern classroom. See the hilarious, and ongoing, twitter tag #pencilchat.

Anyway, as I've mentioned before I'm course leader for a course D41SS Social Sustainability. When I was given the course outline approved by the School I did not really have an idea what social sustainability was, except a term used by the old Lab/Lib Scottish Executive to justify environment destroying developments because they'd deliver jobs. So, I worked from my own definition, but also it would be fun to get my students in class to tweet (@SocSus) or email from their laptops/smartphones, or text me with their definitions.

Here is the Wordle created from their definitions:

And here's what I said on Blackboard when I posted it for the students to see:

If you click on it it'll take you to the wordle website where it should be clearer. I actually came up with this as mainly a bit of fun interaction and hadn't really considered its pedagogic value. But. your definitions were so good I'm definitely going to do thisnext year. The interesting patterns I see are your focus on "social" and "society" (I deleted all references to "social sustainability" and just left your actual definitions) and also people. I think this links to Habermas' communicative action we were discussing in the lecture on Monday. This is especially the case considering how strongly inclusion and opportunity feature as well - the question then becomes who's norms are we talking about? And are all included equally in discussions about those norms? You're also clearly concerned about resources and services and how they're distributed - this will be a key thing to consider in the rest of the course and really gets at the heart of the issues about norms and equality.

One thing I had not considered when writing this course which you have mentioned is inter-generational equity and equality - see how big future is. I'd really like to hear what you think of this wordle, so feel free to comment, or for those who do, tweet to @SocSus.