4_CaseStudy


 * Vicki Smith** is currently employed in a media and communications role for the VLNC. She has been an ICTPD facilitator, an ePrincipal and independently contracted in delivery of a creative project via the VLN. Here she presents a case study, of confident, connected and actively collaborating students enabled in their learning through opportunities the N4L should provide.

**Snapshot**
Sonny Zhang Li, a student at Newton Central School is leading today’s research meeting and introduces his special guest as he picks up a tablet device and dials into an online environment. This opens a window on the interactive whiteboard that he and a group of students are gathered around.

On screen we also see drawings of two long stylised lizard-like creatures one of the students had just drawn after being taken on a virtual field trip with a team of students from Opihi College. The Opihi class took a mobile device with them on their outing with local Kaitiaki and connected with the research group on arrival at the nearby site of Maori rock drawings sharing especially the famous Ruataniwha.

Greta, who is also working on this project, can be seen at home in Waiheke. Behind her on the wall are the originals of the drawings she has submitted to the research team’s learning space. Greta meets the nationally distributed research team once a week to work on the Ruataniwha project otherwise interacting with them and their three teachers through the learning space.

Sonny has bought in his grandmother who is interpreting the questions and responses to the group by a Dao master from their community in China. The group are exploring the relationship between the images of Rua Taniwha and the water dragon and sunbird phoenix iconography. The interview today is to background some of the questions they wish to put to Professor Tane Haikai when they meet with him in their next online session.

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**Background **
The student’s topic of exploration was prompted by tuning into the public presentation at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum in February by the French Cave art specialist Professor Jean Clottes. After the lecture a teacher from Raglan posted in the comments section that she had some students interested in looking at cave art in Aotearoa/NZ and inviting other interested parties. In total forty five students became actively engaged in the project. This core group is made up of students from classes in five different schools, and several home-schooled students. A much larger number followed the progress by adding the project to their interests space in their learning area.

The brainstorming and negotiation around the research focus and outcomes took place in the Network4Learning brokerage area with a moderator assigned to the process to facilitate details such as access and responsibilities of participants.

All resources are hosted within the project learning space and students highlight, through their ePortfolios, work they have submitted or collaborated on in order to annotate their individual learning. Fieldtrips and interviews are available as podcasts for students who cannot attend in real-time and students peer review the common workspace material.

The project took place over a term with each school allocating teacher time to facilitate the progress and to respond to the forum questions not answered from within the student group and to provide formative and summative assessment. Parents and caregivers were also involved in the feedback and feed-forward process for students.

The outcome of the project is a video the students create using Adobe WorkFlow that they have the rights for as part of the Network4Learning space. They are coached through the collaborative film production by a group of year 11 Media Studies students that they access with support of the student negotiators through the network. The outcome is released under Creative Commons licence and hosted alongside all their research material.

**Postscript**
A new configuration of students picked up the work of the original group in their research for an interactive drama production. One of the group was a student from Kaingaroa in the Rehoku/Wharekauri/Chatham islands who wanted to incorporate an interpretation of the Momori Rakau (Dendroglyphs). The resulting performance work was featured in the presentation to Te Papa of the outcomes of a Moriori research project on migration.

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**Key Message** The most important R (that is enabled by N4L and remote/local) is Relationship