Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate an electronic poster as an example of a hybrid learning application to be used by librarians in Higher Education Institution libraries for teaching the research process to honours students in research methodology.
Presentation explores the use of the electronic poster to provide honours students at both a face-to-face and a distance education institution with an overview of the research process. As first-time researchers, honours students have Research Methodology as a required subject, and they must hand in a mini-thesis as part of their coursework. The poster will guide students through the different steps of the research process, which are: finding a topic, formulating a problem statement, writing the research proposal, the literature
review, research methodology approaches, empirical research – i.e. do the surveys, questionnaires, etc., and conclusion.
The electronic poster will be hosted on Glogster.com. Glogster is a web portal that allows users to create free interactive posters, or glogs, and share them with others in a variety of formats. The user inserts text, images, photos, audio (MP3), videos, special effects and other elements into their glogs to generate a multimedia online creation. Glogster is based on flash elements and provides a platform to produce any number of posters that can be shared with a wider audience, or the entire Glogster community. Glogs may also be
exported and saved to computer-compatible formats. While the electronic poster will be hosted on Glogster it will include a variety of Web 2.0 applications to showcase how these can be successfully incorporated in an online learning experience. Some of these applications include lecture videos hosted on platforms such as YouTube, Academic Earth and FORA.tv; PowerPoint presentations hosted on SlideShare (the world’s largest community for uploading and sharing presentations); presentations hosted on Prezi.com (a story telling and presentation tool); podcasts; video presentations hosted on animato.com (a video mashup application). As technology is only a channel for learning it still needs to be supported by face-to-face training. It is hoped that the electronic poster
will provide an overview for the honours students of the various aspects of research process, while meeting the needs of both social and solitary learners. For social learners the poster will provide topics for discussion with their supervisor and subject librarian, while solitary learners preferring to work independently can explore each aspect in more detail at their own pace.