digiphobia
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Digital natives and the class blogging blues
It’s been quite a week and a bit getting a new class of students signed up and into blogging on a group project. I’ve written before on the apparent e-learning challenges to students, and on some of the roadblocks I’ve encountered with their digiphobia. This time round, very few found the process of signing up with edublogs … the platform I’d chosen for the class blog … to be a trial. It seemed that following the instructions and getting themselves signed in with user names was just too complicated to bother persisting. Keep the approach simple, but no simpler (thanks Einstein).
However, I’m wondering after the past 10 days whether, rather than the unfamiliar navigation in a new environment being the stumbling block, that it’s not the actual process of reading online that is the real problem.
Continue reading ...E-learning challenges one year on
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?
School Starts: e-learning’s in the air
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.
Mistress of my own domain … what was I thinking?
Image: Vicki and Chuck Rogers Yes I was seduced. Yesterday WordPress.com, today WordPress.org … tomorrow the world! I wanted my own domain site populated by all of my stuff and under my control. I paid my $$ up front, got the domain site, a friendly and supportive host, and started my empire building. Yesterday was
Continue reading ...Turning over the archives: iPods and Podcasting
I’m often asked to comment on how I use Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs, iPods and podcasting in my teaching and learning projects. I presented on the topic a few times this year at conferences and a phone call this week from someone I met at the AUC Create World conference in Brisbane in late
Continue reading ...How Digitally-Native are Gen-Y?
I teach Generation Y on a daily basis. These are the so-called ‘digital natives.’ I see this latter term popping up all the time round the web, and I wanted to test how comfortable these Gen Y-ers are with the digital world. I have written earlier about my concerns regarding student digiphobia:My Adventure Continues or
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Day 18 and some comment forensics
Image: thanks to Stephen Downes
Which of my posts have attracted the most comments, and which have kicked off the best conversations? I thought it a worthwhile exercise to track back over all of my posts to get a feel for this, not just those during the current 31 Day Comment Challenge. Whew!
OK … well I have to ‘fess up that I received very few comments at all during the first life of my blog. This blog Spinning a Learning Web started as something else altogether, and got a makeover during 2007 into its current focus on adventurous e-learning, and with a big nod to good design and Mac things.
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