Educational Development

Dr Laurene Vaughan gave a talk in the design building tonight about her work at RMIT developing online post grad courses in fashion design (no direct link available).

Laurene spent some time describing the types of students that enroll in her post grad courses, mostly people employed in the design industry or running their own design business. She therefore explained that there is a need for workplace education to offer such students a maximum amount of flexibility in their study.

Laurene spent about an hour talking about the various structures of the course, showing us examples and flagging issues along the way. But it wasn't until the end, when she started mentioning blogging, wikis, and other social network software that the attendees started to respond.

I was pleased to see quite a deal of interest in the design staff towards blogging and other forms of collaborative communication devices, and the potential for the reflective/process journal learning method, enhanced by Internet communications technologies.

After a short tea break we returned to discuss these things a little more, and I took the opportunity to pass around a print out of up and coming EDC workshops offering training in a wide range of social networking software like blogs.