e-learning
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Day 2: Comment08
Photo: Thanks Doug Miller And so to day 2 and visiting a previously-unvisited blog. Easy this one and a nice outcome. Several of my commenters are new to me, so it was a pleasure to visit all of their blogs and to leave a couple of comments and they commented back and hey ho, off
Continue reading ...Another 31-Day Challenge!
Image: Thanks Stephen Downes Last August, and along with a smallish but hardy group of bloggers, I took the 31 Days to a Better Blog Challenge, led by the energetic and insightful Michele Martin of the Bamboo Project. As I’ve written elsewhere, this was a seminal event in my development as a blogger. (Use the
Continue reading ...The State of e-learning in Early 08
Image from WikipediaOne of my favourite sites is The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies which contains a link to Jane Hart’s blog. Jane keeps a finger on the pulse of e-learning and she’s doing some great longitudinal research into who is using what tools and where. I’ve been signed up via her blog this
Continue reading ...The Broken Link Blues
Well it had to happen sometime. I was alerted yesterday morning on my Dashboard that someone had provided a bit of link love to one of my posts from September last year. The link cited a small vodcast I had produced. At this time I was working on the Blogger platform; since then I have gone across to Wordpress.org.
Now I thought all permalinks and post content were … well, permanent. Not so. When in a misguided sweep-up after a few months on the new platform I deleted the old blog … bang went the post’s internal links. The end result is that the link provided yesterday turns up the post, but the link from there to the media file is dead, kaput, out of service, Error 404 etc. How many more are there I wonder!
Continue reading ...PD, Twitter and Me
I stopped by a PD session for educators online this morning. It was run via ustream.tv on the wiki site Open pd and was not without its glitches (sound drop outs etc but this is almost mandatory in sessions like this). This truly open, global professional development session demonstrated a very useful way for individuals’
Continue reading ...Organisational Change and the Power of Collegiality
There’s been something of a theme running through the last half dozen or so posts here. I guess it’s a function of the time in the new academic year … beginnings and the raising of issues that are challenging us all. I was at another faculty meeting last week where e-learning was discussed. You could feel spines stiffen a bit as the topic went round the table. The conversation went something like this: ‘People won’t (make an effort/change their way of doing things/appear to be even slightly interested in innovation or … add your own phrase here) unless they are made to.’ Now the ‘people’ being referred to are academics. I’m moved to ask what happened to the spirit of intellectual inquiry and the desire to develop one’s scholarly practice? Well that’s another matter, but for now there’s a management imperative that has to be addressed by individuals in the faculty collective, and fast.
Continue reading ...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?
Which way to the classroom?
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.
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Cinco de Mayo or Day 5 of the Comment Challenge
Now Cinco de Mayo is huge elsewhere, but it kind of passes us by down here in Australia, a bit the way Australia Day would in Mexico. There you go! However what does unite us globally on a daily … seemingly hourly basis what with television, Twitter, Facebook et al … are words and images,
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