Anne Fox :: Blog :: 21st century skills and mentoring

I was invited by the EVOLVE project to do an online session to present the VITAE project. The EVOLVE project is described as follows:

The Evolve project is organising a series of international on-line events and seminars.

The objectives are:

• To provide a space for participant driven discussion and debate
• To promote critical inquiry and discourse
• To allow for the presentation of ideas in progress
• To share expertise, ideas and future thinking around common research agendas

My own session was entitled 21st century skills and mentoring and was an opportunity to test out the ideas developed in the project so far to a wider audience. I had planned the session to be a presentation followed by a workshop in which participants tried out for themselves responding to the mentor questions which form an integral part of the VITAE training approach. I guess that the workshop element did not work so well and there could be two reasons for this. One could be that the mentor sessions are not good enough and do not elicit responses. The second option (which I want to believe) is that much more time was needed for reflection before answering the mentor questions and especially that the course tasks needed to be attempted before proceeding to the mentor questions.

It was undoubtedly a good exercise for me as project coordinator to have to set out my stall in this way and although we did not follow the mentoring questions too closely there were some interesting discussions, which after all, is mainly the point. It was also interesting to learn about another ongoing European project which could have a great deal in common with VITAE in a complementary fashion. This is the MUVEnation project which is also using the peer to peer teaching idea but which is more closely focussed on the use of multi-user virtual environments as learning tools.

 

The link to the archive is http://elluminate.jiscemerge.org.uk/play_recording.html?recordingId=1213208486375_1213960145754 You will need audio.

As well as presenting the project another main objective was to present the VITAE community of practice which has just been set up as a Ning community at http://vitaeproject.ning.com The Ning space is designed primarily for the participants in our forthcoming training courses but we would love to see anybody who is interested in the project as well so that we can help each other along the way.