Social Environment for Arts Education and Research

Abstract

Current learning environments follow a traditional organization where there is someone in control, the administrator, someone responsible for the content available, the teacher, and then someone to absorb the knowledge transmitted by the professor, the learners. This system denies students the opportunity to share their knowledge and contribute to the learning environment. Discussion about research results and work done is one of the most beneficial activities to improve art student's capacities and helps them express their thoughts and ideas. Limitations imposed by the learning environments prevent students from sharing their work, especially to share different multimedia contents such as images, video and audio files. Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) can overcome most difficulties of current learning environments, however, tools are spread in different platforms and no one uses the same tools, difficulting collaboration and content sharing between individuals. In this dissertation we explore the opportunity to create a social learning environment in order to overcome most learning management systems handicaps and to shorten the need for disperse tools in which personal learning environments depends. This will allow students to share different multimedia content with each other, enabling their work to be seen and used by the community and, at the same time, improving critical thinking. Furthermore, the problem of communication between students from remote locations and distance learning is also addressed. In order to accomplish such environment, Drupal, a Content Management System (CMS), is being used, which will allow us to extend its functionalities in order to be able to allow students to share their work in groups, to contribute with their knowledge allowing them to post content and to communicate in a more convenient way. Different approaches to how to enchant Drupal are studied and their benefits and downsides are compared. The final platform has been tested by members of NEA (Núcleo de Educação Artística), an organization which takes action in arts education and investigation, and later by students from their courses. As expected, this solution will help achieve a higher communication between students, allowing easier sharing of contents and awake creativity and critical sense, removing the necessity to use different tools located in different environments, however it will not substitute tools for content creation and editing. It was also proven that this solution can suite distance education and even the possibility to use it for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) is left open.