Examples Derived from the LADIE Project

The examples on this page have been derived from the JISC-funded  LADIE project and are adapted from the use case documents.

Constructing a collaborative web-based timeline (History)

Students on a third-year university course create a collaborative web-based interactive timeline based on a relational database. The system enables students to create timelines, enter points, enter notes, references and hyperlinks, add comments to (annotate) each other’s entries, to choose between two permissions levels (public or private) and to display the information in a number of different ways. The activity encourages students to write concise notes, manipulate their information and collaborate with others to deepen their understanding of the course content. The system could alternatively be used for other ordered documents, such as glossaries.

Critical thinking and reflective skills

The learning activity introduces university students to an aspect of critical thinking: argument analysis. The teacher presents the students with a series of digitised video clips from a film and asks them to analyse/evaluate the clips using a framework that has been presented to them previously. Students post their analyses to the discussion area and comment on the contributions made by other students in an attempt to encourage reflective thinking. The discussion is moderated by the teacher.

Collecting and evaluating resources (Design engineering)

Aims of the session:

• Acquire information management literacies and develop design ideas.
• Enable the creation of useful student-generated resources for future teaching and learning.

Third-year campus-based Engineering students meet at least twice a week and are in online or face to face contact with each other and their tutor at other times. As the first stage in a design project to produce a “proof-of-concept” model of a domestic ice crushing machine, teams of 4 students search for and manage relevant resources, and write a reflective team report and presentation for other teams and tutors using the wiki pages.

The teacher sets up and monitors an activity in which students collect, manage, discuss, and evaluate resources, using a modified wiki, as the first stage in a group design project.

Technical information:
The online environment offered to support the activity includes a range of tools to support communication: email, Skype, communication features inside the wiki environment (Shoutbox, discussion forums, email, blogging). The wiki tool also provides a workspace for students to share content with other team members. The wiki (LauLima) has been extensively modified with a permissions system which allows selective sharing of content. Students, therefore, control who can access their content. The wiki has also been modified to allow hierarchical file storage systems rather than a flat file structure.