Learning Networks and the Issue of Communication Skills

Abstract

The expansion of UK further and higher education over the last decade has been accompanied by increased use of communication and information technologies (C&ITs) to aid the management of teaching and learning amongst the resulting larger and more divers e student communities. Various forms of C&IT support have been developed, but one type of growing importance is the use of conferencing systems to enable interactions between teachers and learners that would otherwise be unlikely to occur, because of constraints of time and/or distance. Video conferencing (one to one, one to many, many to many), text-based communication (e-mail, bulletin boards, synchronous and asynchronous conferencing,) and audio conferencing (telephone tutoring, shared workspace plus audio link) are the principle technologies that have emerged to serve these mediated forms of learning interaction.

The work discussed in this chapter was undertaken during the Learning Networks: Communication Skills (LNCS) project, funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (nsC) betweenJanuary 1999and March 2000, as part of the Committeeon Awareness, Liaison and Training (CALT) Networked Learning initiative. The web deliverabledescribedin the chaptercan be viewedat http://www.gla.ac.uk/lncs/