Oui!Learn Tools and Technologies

On this page, the emphasis is on the technological dimension of the people-place-technology matrix or network that is at the core of Oui!Learn’s educational philosophy and practices. They will be employed as part of one’s repertoire as a networked, digital academic. It includes suggestions for useful tools, apps and software packages that can be deployed in enacting an active, creative, social learning pedagogy. It is a work in progress and examples will be added as they are discovered.

General discussions of educational technologies, platforms and technical terms

The Warwick Open Space Learning project has created a wiki of technology terms, explaining heir use and their value for educational practices

Reference

O’Toole, R. (2011). A wiki of technologies. Warwick Open Space Learning. Available from https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/resources/outputs/osl/technology/wiki/ [Accessed 17 February 2018].

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy publishes scholarship examining digital and multimodal composing practices and promotes work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media.

Allied to Kairos is the PraxisWiki, which publishes webtexts exploring the intersections and tangents of digital writing and pedagogy. PraxisWiki invites pieces demonstrating pedagogy in action, research methods in practice, scholarly concepts in development, and so on.

Information management and qualitative analysis

Reference managers, such as Zotero and Mendeley, are valuable not just for their citation and referencing but also for file management and information management. When articulated with qualitative analysis tools, such as NVivo, they provide a powerful means of exploring the digital content that one has curated as one’s research database.

Curation tools

There are number of tools available for making curated collections of digital content, such as, for example, Scoop It!, Pinterest and Padlet. They overlap with online notebooks, such as, for example, Evernote and Diigo.

Online notebooks

As noted in the Curation Tools section, online notebooks overlap with curation tools as places to assemble collections of digital content, whether text, photos, audio, video, web clippings, i.e. snapshots of web pages, and files. The main examples are Evernote and Diigo.

Dissemination tools

Among the main (free) options for developing a professional web presence and resources for teaching are Blogger, WordPress, Google Sites and Wix. They all combine, to greater or lesser extents, blogging with content management.

Other notification tools include Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Academic social networking sites

The main examples here are Acdemia.edu, ResearchGate, LinkedIn, as well as the academic use of Facebook. To some extent, reference management tool, such as Mendeley, also operate as social networking tools.