PACE and Online Learning and Engagement
The 2013 Student Experience and Expectation of Technology survey reinforces the impression that the twenty-first century student has a significant digital engagement (Gosper M, McKenzie J, Pizzica J, Malfroy J, Ashford-Rowe K, Student use of technologies
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PACE and Online Learning and Engagement Sherman Young and Ian Solomonides
The 2013 Student Experience and Expectation of Technology survey reinforces the impression that the twenty-first century student has a significant digital engagement (Gosper et al. 2014). In the survey, 96 % of students had access to a laptop or desktop computer at home, and 82 % had access to a smartphone. In that context, there is a clear possibility that students could use those tools in all aspects of their lives, including their learning. Experiential learning is no different, and this chapter looks at how the online technologies might be used to improve and extend the PACE experience. Drawing on Resnick1 (1998), we can think about how PACE might both use online tools and affect the online realm itself. There are obvious opportunities for using online technologies in PACE activities. Already we have piloted the use of video chat tools like Skype to enable international partnerships, whilst the possibilities of building on bespoke tools, emerging connectivity and interoperability protocols, and social networks to enable, manage (and monitor) PACE activities are manifold. Similarly, it is relatively easy to conceive of PACE activities which can shape the online environment, for example by working with industry partners to build solutions that support a range of online enabled activities, whether they be technical, cultural or political. This is already happening with existing software development
1 David Resnick suggested that: Politics in contemporary Cyberspace constitutes three distinct types: (1) politics within the Net, concerning the internal operation of the Net and involving those online, (2) politics which impacts the Net, dealing with the policies and regulation of governments affecting Cyberspace and (3) political uses of the Net, concerning how Cyberspace is used to affect political life off line.
S. Young () • I. Solomonides Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 J. Sachs, L. Clark (eds.), Learning Through Community Engagement, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0999-0_17
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partnerships, and increasingly international partners are keen to develop their online presence – which may be enabled by student engagement in relevant PACE activities. In many ways though, work, which involves the net and its artifacts, is itself normal practice and PACE projects involving online projects will increasingly be normalised. It could be argued that this is the least challenging dimension of online engagement. As the boundaries of online and offline blur across all industries and sectors, any PACE partnership is likely to involve students working on projects which shape the online world, whether they be as simple as developing web-based communications, building smartphone apps or working with NGOs to influence policy approaches such as net neutrality. Conceptually, the hardest (and potentially most innovat
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