From the French Side: Recognizing Skills Using Moodle to Planning Menus on Prezi on the way to Doug Kellner’s Views of IT

Once again, Profweb takes a look at articles that have appeared in our French language service to give members of the anglophone community an update on developments in the francophone side of the college network.

CERAC

Communities of practice are difficult to establish and take ongoing work to maintain. Audrey Corbeil has written an excellent portrait of a community of practice that has been established between various CERACs. The acronym roughly translates into Centers for the Recognition of Acquired Knowledge and Skills. Audrey was a member of a team consisting of herself as well as Orzu Kamalova and Michel Cloutier to create a community of practice between the four CERACs in order to promote communication between approximately 100 counsellors in the recognition of acquired knowledge and skills, the 20 employees of the CERAC Centres themselves, as well as a few employees of MESRS (Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de la Science).

A survey was taken to determine the function of such a community of practice. The following needs were identified:

• Offer support and counsel
• Provide a place for exchanges
• Propose continuing education
• Conduct research and communicate breaking trends
• Raise the effectiveness and credibility of knowledge and skills recognition on the college level

And they chose to use Moodle to accomplish these goals! This use of the Moodle Platform was not a website and was security protected. The graphics and structure of the site allowed everyone to take ownership of the medium, and of course, the familiarity of many of the users with Moodle helped all to adapt to the resource. Besides the article, Profweb’s newsletter provided a link to a video about the community of practice in English with Orzu Kamalova.

Nutrition and Pathology

We are increasingly seeing the phenomenon of teachers who know a lot about information technology in education with little or no experience in using it. We would like to think that some of this familiarity comes from reading Profweb. In an article about creating a flipped classroom in a course in Nutrition, Mélanie Jacqmain of Collège Limoilou fell into this category when she received release time to prepare materials for an inverted course in her field. What she did know is where to go to get help and praises Élisabeth Laliberté the technician she worked with to create the materials for her course.

She created videos, assembled Prezis, incorporated material from the web into her course and, in general, met with a lot of success. The promise of ICT has always been that material created can be effectively reused and this aspect of the IT phenomenon will be put to the test as another teacher will be soon teaching Mélanie’s course using her materials.

Another positive result of this experience is that Mélanie has been bitten by the IT bug and will soon be incorporating a blog into another course!

The Pedagogical Imperative of Information and Communication Technology

Critical pedagogy is a humanist approach to education which seeks to create critical thinkers and agents for social transformation from among our students. According to this approach, students must be equipped to understand and analyze how new media influences our perspective on the world, creating new needs and values. The article focuses on one researcher in particular, Douglas Kellner, whose texts and recordings on the subject are quite fascinating, but also gives links to the works of a number of others.

The article gives an overview of a number of concepts that Kellner describes. One is critical literacy, being able to situate the influence of media upon message. As well, the team of Doug Kellner and Jeff Share chart a number of reactions over the insertion of media into education varying from protecting students from it to the Media Literacy Movement whose goal is make students aware of the influence of media on their culture.

Although this article is principally a summary of Kellner’s writings translated into French, readers of the English site should appreciate links to Kellner’s material which they can access in the original. There are also interesting links in French giving the reader an overview of the philosophy of education.