The document summarizes a workshop held in Budapest in March 2009 as part of the REVIVE project. The workshop aimed to provide guidance to practitioners in vocational education on selecting appropriate online tools to support curriculum redesign. It was structured around five pedagogical scenarios presented by participants. Hands-on activities allowed participants to experiment with tools like blogs, wikis, and search engines. The goal was to help educators design engaging, interactive online learning experiences for their own courses.

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REVIVE workshop in Budapest, 8-9 March 2009
Documentation
Welcome to the documentation of the workshop organized in March 2009 in
Budapest as part of the REVIVE project. The workshop was addressed at
academic staff and practitioners working in the sector of Vocational Education
& Training and involved in the process of curriculum redesign. The aim of the
workshop was to offer the practitioners some guidance through the process of
the selection of appropriate tools to support the accomplishment of online
activities planned as part of their courses. You can learn more about the
context of the workshop, and the pedagogical, technological & pragmatic
foundations in which it was grounded, reading - the project deliverable titled:
“Harmonisation of pedagogical and technological methodologies for reviewing
and reviving existing curriculum”1 or browsing through the workshop
introductory presentations2.
The aim of this short document is to give an idea of the workshop’s structure.
It offers a short, guided tour through the collection of digital traces left by the
workshop organizers and participants. The Moodle platform accompanied the
workshop participants throughout and after the face-to-face training session.
Basically, the participants had two types of presence: a traditional one (they
were physically present in a seminar room) and a virtual one (they were
logged in to the Moodle platform and to the selected social software tools).
The Moodle platform was used for three different purposes: as a presentation
tool, a tool to work with during the hands-on activities, and a single-point of
access to all the workshop materials such as learning scenarios,
presentations, descriptions of tools, tool usage scenarios and good practice
examples.
The whole training was structured around five pedagogical scenarios
prepared by the workshop participants prior to the event: learning as an
1 http://www.reviveproject.eu/node/7
2
http://www.slideshare.net/askawild/revive-workshop-introduction
http://www.slideshare.net/askawild/revive-pedagogical-methodology

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individual, collaboration & collaborative writing, reflection on content & critical
thinking, reflection on learning process, and communicating & discussing.
Each scenario was presented as a separate topic, and all the topics followed
a similar structure.
Now, let’s have a closer look at one of the topics: Collaboration and
collaborative writing (Screenshot 1).
Screenshot 1: Topic 4. Collaboration and collaborative writing
The topic starts with a presentation of a learning scenario for collaboration
(Screenshot 1, no. 1) made by one of the project participants according to a
template provided by the workshop organizers. Using questions as guidelines
the participant describes an authentic learning scenario for her course
(Screenshot 2).
Screenshot 2: Example of a learning scenario for collaboration
The presentation is followed by a plenary discussion about the kind of tools
that students might need to accomplish this collaborative activity.

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Next, the workshop participants are provided with an example of a similar
learning activity accomplished by a group of students during the iCamp
project trials. (Screenshot 1, no. 2). The application examples from the iCamp
project constitute an important part of the REVIVE workshop. To facilitate the
access to the dispersed artefacts created by the facilitators and students
involved in the iCamp trials the workshop organisers set up a separate blog in
Wordpress – a single point of access to a large collection of use cases and
related artefacts (Screenshot 3).
Screenshot 3: reVIVE blog
You might find it useful to have a closer look at different cases presented
within the reVIVE blog.
Next, the participants are encouraged to try out some selected tools,
(Screenshot 1, no. 3) in this case two different kinds of blogs: the Moodle
blog, and Wordpress – one of the most popular blogging tools in the world of
social software. Both blogs were made interoperable through a small plug-in
developed within the iCamp project, the so-called FeedBack. The participants
are divided into groups, each given a task to accomplish (Screenshot 4).

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Screenshot 4: Example of a task designed for a hands-on activity with blogs
All groups provide the solutions to their tasks in form of a blog post.
Depending on individual preferences they post the answers either within the
Moodle blog or in Wordpress (Screenshot 5).
Later on during this hands-on activity the participants try out the FeedBack
plug-in for their blogs: they subscribe to each other blogs to get regular
updates, they read and comment on each others contributions.
Screenshot 5: Example of a solution to a task designed for a hands-on activity
with blogs.
Finally, some other tools facilitating collaboration and collaborative writing,
such as Google docs, Wikis and Doodle, are also introduced in this session.
(Screenshot 1, no. 5). Additionally, at any point of time during the workshop
the participants can access the descriptions of relevant tools accompanied by

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the usage scenarios simply by browsing through the blog posts and wiki
entries with help of tags (Screenshot 6 and 7).
Screenshot 6: Revive workshop tag cloud
Screenshot 7: Example of a usage scenario for Google docs provided as a blog
post within the Moodle platform
Now, let’s move to another topic: Learning as an individual (Screenshot 8).
The aim of this topic is to encourage the workshop participants to give the
learners more control over the learning process and learning resources.
Within the Moodle platform the possibilities for students to upload and share
their own learning resources are very limited. During this session the
workshop participants learn how those limitations can be overcome with help
of social software.

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Screenshot 8: Topic 3. Learning as an individual
First, the participants are introduced to the ObjectSpot search engine
designed in the iCamp project to facilitate academic research. It realises
federated searches over a large number of digital libraries and learning object
repositories directly from the Moodle platform (Screenshot 9).
Screenshot 9: ObjectSpot block on Moodle
This is another hands-on activity – the participants are asked to use the
ObjectSpot engine to search for materials related to their domain. Interesting
resources should be added as bookmarks to the participants’ accounts in
delicious and tagged with REVIVE. A very similar activity is done with blogs.
The participants search for interesting blogs in the domain of their interest and
paste the feed url to their freshly set-up Google Reader accounts.

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Above we presented a small selection of topics and hands-on activities
realised during the REVIVE workshop in Budapest. The workshop was
designed to be highly engaging and interactive. It was structured around the
pedagogical scenarios prepared by the workshop participants. This situated
the learning experience in authentic problems and encouraged the
practitioners to think “out of the box” while searching for the most appropriate
tools to support the learning activities planned as part of their courses.