Web 2.0 Untangled: Levy & Webber on Inquiry Based Learning

Our next talk was Philippa Levy and Sheila Webber (https://twitter.com/sheilayoshikawa) from the University of Sheffield’s Information School talking about Inquiry Based Learning. Their presentation is on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber

Inquiry Based Learning is where student inquiry and research drives the experience of learning right from the first year of university rather than having students passively listening to lectures. Obviously in such an environment information literacy, the ability to discern the best source of information, is key. In their particular course they used a lot of Web 2.0 technology- students conducted research interviews in Second Life, and communicated with each other for group exercises online.

It all sounded very interesting, and I could see the similarities with the Oxford tutorial system. The key differences were that there were more Web 2.0 applications; students were forming their own research questions at an earlier stage, thus giving them more experience by the time it came to making a dissertation question; and undergraduate students were engaged more with conducting research. See their slides for more details!

(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)