Image via CrunchBase, source unknown I spent a few days recently at the Apple University Consortium (AUC) Create World held at Griffith U in Brisbane Australia. I was part of a podcast team headed by Allan Carrington and Ian Green from Adelaide University. I managed to get some interviews with various presenters and participants in
Continue reading ...Image via Wikipedia Are you blogging more and enjoying it less? No … OK, are you twittering more and blogging less? Or does twittering/tweeting count as blogging/micro-blogging? Is there a trend developing here? Does it really matter? My own rhythm of online communication and blogging in the past couple of months has altered a lot.
Continue reading ...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
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
Continue reading ...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’
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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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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?
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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Reflections on a month …
Image via Wikipedia Nearly at the end now, and days 29-31 have been about wrapping up the 31 Day Comment Challenge. The final 3 days focus on the learnings: to prepare a commenting guide for students, to consider how learnings from this commenting project could change one’s teaching practices, and finally … to reflect on
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