There’s the whiff of conferences in the air right now. Monday starts the 3rd annual AUC (Apple University Consortium) Create World Conference at Griffith University in Brisbane. I’ll be working with a team of podcasters headed by Alan Carrington from the University of Adelaide. We will be gathering comment not just from presenters and performers,
Continue reading ...I’ve embedded a small 6 and a half minute sound file below. I produced it quite quickly about around a year ago in response to a request from Sue Waters, a Higher Ed colleague in Perth, WA. She wanted some feedback from others who were dipping their toes or leaping into the deep-end of the
Continue reading ...This is a comment ‘upgraded’ to a post. The original was in response to an inquiry from a colleague in the US. She asked for some tips on using a class blog. My response got long, and by the end I thought it probably could do with a dust-off and a reshaping into a stand-alone
Continue reading ...We’re in transition here in terms of study materials provision. With the push for student e-portfolios coming hard, it’s imperative that well-designed and presented study materials be prepared for offering on line or via digital media. Until then and until students are engaged positively in using online systems, feel comfortable and confident with their use,
Continue reading ...It’s (late) on blog reader appreciation day, and I wanted to say thanks to everyone out there for your part in making my adventures in e-learning such a rewarding experience. The ‘Dear Reader’ was often acknowledged in those great 19th century novels; the Misses Bronte and others knew how powerful an incentive the readerly eyes
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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.
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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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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.
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Comments as Inspiration
Where to begin on this one? I seem to have done little apart from read comments this week, and then trackback to the blog posts that spawned them. That was an interesting exercise in itself, and as is the way of blogs, one of Tony Karrer’s recent posts on eLearning Technology tracked me back to
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