There were a number of areas that I’d considered focusing on for this post – a particularly interesting one for me is the idea of situated cognition and communities of practice where that relates to developing the digital literacy and skills of academic staff in order to be able to make the most of digital tools.

However, I’ve decided to focus instead on the student experience, and a particular piece that is a good example of how digital tools afford our learners ways to learn more effectively. The software in question is Mendeley, a reference management tool. Somewhat similar to Endnote, it allows students to save journal articles, record notes and produce automated citations as they do research, and produce references in a number of different approved formats such as APA and MLA.

Mendeley - File Library

Users can easily annotate or highlight their notes. There’s a good tagging function which makes it much easier to locate and categorise notes than was ever the case for my (paper-based) generation. The ease of tagging also makes it easier to find and note connections between ideas in different sources. Again, this is a significant improvement on old pen-and-paper systems.

Mendeley - Highlights and Notes

Mendeley has both free and premium options, though in my experience the free option has been sufficient. It improves on earlier generations of reference management software in several ways, and these can be related to the affordances we’ve studied so far in the e-learning ecologies MOOC.

Mendeley is a versatile tool for supporting collaborative intelligence because it allows groups of users to share articles and their notes, highlights, annotations and citations. Academic research, then, is no longer merely a solitary, individual effort. Groups of students can more easily share ideas and engage in collective study, benefiting from common access to each other’s notes and sources. Teachers themselves can be part of these groups, and add their own comments to documents, thus making Mendeley more than simply a reference management tool, but a potential space for collaboration and debate – an online, cloud-based forum of sorts.

Furthermore, in using a common platform, students able to synchronise their academic practices more closely with each other and with the expectations of the university – all students sharing a common folder will be able to see the types of articles that their peers are sharing, better understand what counts as a valid academic source, and how to cite and reference that material.

It also exemplifies some of the other affordances that we’ve learned about so far in the MOOC. The software can be accessed through a browser on a PC or Mac, but can also be downloaded to a desktop, or as an app to both Android and iOS devices. This promotes ubiquity, as learners are easily able to access study material whenever suits them, and don’t need to be online to do this.

By collaborating in a space like this, particularly by sharing notes and highlights, students are able to participate collaboratively in active knowledge making on the topics they study, more effectively than perhaps would be the case in a conventional pedagogy of lectures, seminars and homework.

Finally, as mentioned above, if the teacher was to join a student group on Mendeley and communicate by adding notes and comments in response to students, learners could potentially benefit from recursive feedback as they develop their ideas on a given topic even before the submission of a formal assessment.