I’ve spent the last two Wednesday mornings hanging out with the students from the Diploma in Communication and Media course and their teacher Peter Bradbury.

During both sessions, we’ve had a great time talking about all sorts of things web-related, and the group will be using blogs and wikis to complete their projects throughout the Semester.

Last week, we planned projects and explored some cool sites including Blogger and Flickr. We also set up a blog to record the students work – check out The Gong Media Blog.

The class came up with a great mission statement, which we’ve included:

To have fun…. and in doing so ‘profile and promote’ our course to and within the wider community… by means of managing a project/event and thereby encouraging future enrolment. In doing so, we hope to create an unforgettable learning experience for all.

Micael will be editor of The Gong Media Blog, and will be coordinating posts and working with the class facilitators, making sure that all the students work is recorded and showcased together and the blog is developed into a place to find out more about the Communications and Media course. He will also act as moderator on the blog – coordinating, consulting and negotiating with his fellow students and facilitators on this process as we go.

This morning, we spent a couple of hours talking about how each of the teams would record their projects during the Semester, and decided that Wikis were probably a great place to start.

Each of the teams has a wikispace set up now – ready for the work they will be doing to coordinate a number of interesting projects and develop some cool resources. Check out:

• Jacqui’s Radio Doco Project
• Nicole and Lani Project – Video Project
• Alysha’s and Gerry’s Project – The Mass Debate
• Janelle, Sarah, Will and Eve’s Project – Grab the Grads
• Emma and Jess’ Project

We’ve edited the blog’s ‘sidebar’ to include links to all the newly created wikispaces, so everyone’s work is linked together. A few more to come yet – but it’s a great start to our new Communication and Media Learning Community.

I was very impressed with the energy and cooperation all the teams showed, as they worked together to negotiate names for their new wikispaces and discussed how they would manage them.

A special shout-out has to go to our class web publishing gurus! Jacqui has set up an awesome wiki to show-off her artwork and has even included some How-to resources to help her classmates get their heads around HTML! Meanwhile, Eve has created a beautiful blog, with lovely pictures and some great creative writing! Can’t wait to see what you two share with us next!

Big congrats to the class today – you did a great job and I had fun working with you all!