Social Science Scholarships: Emerald InTouch

Thursday, 5 June 2008

Emerald InTouch

Emerald InTouch is a web space and hosting service designed to support learning and collaboration. By bringing together technologies such as blogs, wikis and RSS into one place, Emerald InTouch enables users to create and join communities of practice, engage in reflective learning and collaborate with peers online.

[http://intouch.emeraldinsight.com/]

Features

* Record personal and group reflections;
* Create and join online communities of practice;
* Engage in group discussions;;
* Create personal knowledge repositories or e-portfolios;
* Collaborate with fellow students online; Subscribe to RSS feeds;
* Share multimedia files.

Benefits

* Secure environment for learning and reflection;
* Student-centered not course-led;
* Communities can capture and retain shared knowledge/learning;
* Reduces isolation for distance learners;
* Hosted service frees up institutional IT resources;
* Comprehensive access controls - content can be as private or as public as you wish;
* Provides opportunity for institutions to maintain links with former students or connect with future students.

How is Emerald InTouch currently being used?

* To support distance learning courses at a leading academic institution - students record personal and group reflections on their blogs, assess each other's work by uploading multi-media files, use InTouch as a space to meet and get to know each other prior to the first face-to-face lesson;

* To reduce graduate isolation and support executive MBA courses at a major multi-national firm- employees share ideas and application of theory in between face-to-face training sessions, graduates are encouraged to network with each other despite being based in different offices around the world.

[http://intouch.emeraldinsight.com/content/about.php]