Occasional interludes
Category

Technology and Creativity

Category

E-learning challenges one year on

Footprints

Another year, different students, but how far have we come together with e-learning? Speaking personally, I’m older (I hope wiser) but a lot more savvy in the way I use and continue to experiment in e-learning. As the old Chinese proverb has it … it’s the journey not the arrival (or some such) through which satisfaction and true acheivement arise.
But is there a sense in the air that we’ve moved on, in however small a way along the road? Are the majority of students we work with any more savvy and less technophobic than they were 12 months ago? Are institutions making it easier for teachers to develop their own e-learning skills via professional development and/or easy to use CMS (course management systems)? Have telcos brought down the costs of web access ensuring that ubiqitous little ‘fourth screen’ can become a handheld e-learning device? Do pigs fly?

Continue reading ...

Which way to the classroom?

Workshop Day 1

Acting Class: collaborative text analysis and imaging the narrative

The focus of this post concerns the changing nature of our ‘classrooms’. School’s in for the year and we’ve hit the ground running as they say; at least we’re there on the ground in traditional classrooms, in workshops, and online. The electronic revolution is nibbling insistently if not biting hard yet … at least as far as e-learning is concerned in my neck of the woods.

Last night I worked in a virtual classroom in a live chat with a very small group of students … hope this grows! Memo to self: strategise getting them on board! They still need help, as do my colleagues, to make sense of this Web 2.0 world. I’ve also been working in a traditional classroom in the stand and deliver mode this week, but even there I’m more interested in getting the students to do the learning, rather than to stroke my own ego by giving them the goods culled and mediated through my own experience.

Continue reading ...

Paper to Digital: enriching a learning package

The more work you put into the preparatory phase of a journey … and barring disasters or unforseen circumstances … the smoother the ride. Right? Knowing where you’re going and how to get there is also useful. When it comes to prepping course materials for delivery to students, it’s helpful to switch thinking from what

Continue reading ...

School Starts: e-learning’s in the air


Creative Commons License photo credit: Greg Melia

Next Monday is day 1 of teaching for a new academic year… or should the emphasis be on learning! Change is in the air. It’s a change in thinking, a sort of ‘can-do’ feeling that is beginning to nudge colleagues into giving this e-learning stuff a go. I’ve experienced this several times this week alone at my place. Now change at institutional level can be notoriously slow in uptake, and never more so than in academe. Tried and true ways that ‘work’ are hung on to perhaps long past their shelf freshness date, and for all sorts of good reasons. One of the prime excuses is time-poverty, and free-thinking academics are notorious for resisting the kind of change that comes from above … administrative mandates being one of the most resisted. But I digress a little.

Continue reading ...

Moving into Moodle: the experience for a Mac user

The past couple of weeks have been busy for most academics in
Australia. If they’re not grabbing the last of the summer before term
begins … and it’s been a miserable, wet summer for most of us …
then others are jetting home from far-flung cold climes. Most probably,
like me, they’re prepping for the first semester of the academic year.

Continue reading ...

Back to school isn’t what it used to be: another seasonal adventure

Pencil Shavings

When I was a kid, and it rolled around to back to school time, I used to love stocking up on stationery and getting my new textbooks. The trip to the newsagent (stationery supplier) in January was like Christmas all over again. I remember sniffing the new pages … exercise books provided an entirely different olfactory experience than did text books. I’d marvel over the contents … would all of this unfamiliar knowledge be all mine before the year was up? Then it came to the writing implement of choice for this new academic year … the colour of ink and the heft in the hand had to be right. I remember when those new fangled yellow Biro pens came in, but I loved the smell of Quink ink and the feel of a fountain-pen nib on paper, and still do. A whiff of Clag paste still jolts me back to days of grade school innocence. When I got to university, I experienced the same thrill browsing the shelves in the bookstore. By then it was agonising over the right folder or ‘student portfolio’ to capture lecture notes and to store class handouts in. Now I am all grown up, I still enjoy trawling the shelves at the local office supplies warehouse. But my, how they have grown too; is there no limit to the number and kind of pens these days? I walked the aisles of my local Officeworks a couple of days ago, checking out the latest in the office supplies department. There is more choice than ever, but what you only get a hint of … the tip of the iceberg as it were … is the relentless incursion of the digital world into the quiet backwaters of prepping for a class.

Continue reading ...