My experience with elearning tools is a peculiar one. Let me share it with you

Literature has always been the love of my life. I have studied it, lived it, hated it, and loved it again and again. As a teacher, I always wanted to share my passion for literature to my students. This was of the utmost importance to me. Not only was it my job, not only was it my calling, it was also a very personal matter. I was sharing something that I loved, the stories and poems that constituted my life. In short, I was also sharing myself to my students. So when I first heard that the curriculum was changing in order to include elearning tools as a mode of teaching some of the lessons that we did not have time to tackle in the classroom, I was really caught off guard. I detested the idea. How could something as cold and as impersonal as a computer possibly convey and pass on the passion for literature? The first thoughts that came to my mind was that these students will be hand fed information, memorize them, and just answer a quiz from memory. I felt like there would not be enough of that internal processing necessary to spark that passion I keep talking about. There would be no connections between the self and the text, no real meeting where the self will be see itself in this new light and forever be changed.

But as I soon discovered, elearning tools were actually not that bad. It was not actually meant to replace teachers. I was still there to moderate the thing. It just functioned as a textbook, an interactive textbook which is what makes it better. Now I have changed my opinion of elearning tools for good. I think this new technology is a boon that will help teachers in any subject, so long as it simply an addition to teaching, not a full replacement.

Elearning tools for academic education can really be helpful but I find that relying on them too much could be dangerous. What I am referring to are those software or web based modules. I am a teacher and so I recognize the importance teaching face to face versus simply relying on elearning. This is perhaps, especially true depending on the age of the learner as well as his or her thinking level and capabilities.

There are some people who can really learn a lot from elearning. You see elearning tools are just like learning manuals or textbooks only a lot more interactive. Therefore, it can really be so very useful. However, if one relies solely on these things, then there can be a lot of things missed. Some students are able to learn from a textbook. Some teachers are lazy enough to actually just tell the class to read the textbook. Their job just falls down to filling in a few things that are missing from the text or checking the student’s knowledge by creating a quiz or by recitation. But a true teacher will discuss the subject with so much gusto and will look into the students to see how they are doing. The students themselves will also be able to ask question in the middle of the lecture and may be able to contribute a few things as well. That is the model of learning we are all accustomed to.

So as a teacher, the best thing is to treat academic elearning tools as a convenience and not an absolute substitute. At the least, it can be given to students who are driven and who will fill in the gaps on their own through other sources. At best, it should be treated like textbook courses and a human teacher must still be present somewhere to monitor and to guide.

Jo Macek examines 10 best practices for managing class discussions in an online or virtual classroom. eLearnMag post

http://bit.ly/7KgpYC

Interesting post about Dan Schawbel who is a Personal Branding Consultant who works with schools and small companies. It talks about using social media as a branding tool as a teacher. The concept of creating a brand as an educator is not a new one. But I honestly hadn’t thought of it in this way before. Teachers Talk About Social Media

The National Science Center selects the award-winning RCampus platform for their unique educational effort to bring the science of rainforests to 6th – 8th grade teachers.

Irvine, CA, Nov. 24, 2009: Reazon Systems, Inc., a leading provider of web-based educational technologies, has been selected by the National Science Center (NSC) to make the Discovery Academy Rainforest Project available to teachers and students across the nation.

Through this effort, the Discovery Academy Rainforest Project will be housed at a specially enhanced RCampus environment, allowing NSC to facilitate the management and promotion of its course modules more effectively. Teachers who participate in this project will gain access to standards-based course materials designed by NSC at http://NSC.RCampus.com. RCampus will also facilitate the unique assessment needs of NSC for evaluating the effectiveness of its modules as well as tracking students’ performance.

“It has been a privilege to be selected by the National Science Center for advancing its Rainforest Project to a number of classrooms around the U.S.,” said Ramesh Sabetiashraf, the creator of RCampus. “NSC recognized the extent of RCampus capabilities and identified it as the best vehicle for achieving its mission to bring STEM education to classrooms. We look forward to a continuing alliance and growing relationship with NSC as it extends its digital campus through RCampus.”

“Our efforts to bring our course materials to a broad national audience with various demographics has been a substantial undertaking,” said Cheryl Wynn, Program Manager of the Discovery Academy Rainforest Project at The National Science Center. “It has also come with its unique technology needs and challenges. After testing RCampus for a few months, we found it to be the ideal environment with the necessary tools to meet our needs. The RCampus team has been very responsive in helping us create an online presence for our Rainforest Project and making our program easily accessible to our participants. Our goal is to be the leading K-12 courseware provider in various science, technology, engineering and math subjects as we utilize more features of the RCampus environment. Discovery Academy: R.A.I.N. targets 6 – 8th grade middle schoolers, in particular.”

About Reazon Systems, Inc.
Reazon Systems, Inc., the maker of RCampus, is a software technology company specializing in the transformation of complex and time-consuming instructional, assessment and content management processes into robust and user-friendly experiences. Its flagship product is RCampus Education Management System which includes Learning and ePortfolio Management System, Website-builder and Portals System and the iRubric Assessment and Standards System. RCampus is a recipient of the 2009 TechAmerica High-Tech Innovation Awards for its innovation in software technologies. To learn more about Reazon and the RCampus product-line, visit www.reazon.com and www.RCampus.com.

About the National Science Center
The National Science Center (NSC) is a unique partnership between National Science Center, Inc., a non-profit organization, and the United States Army. Its mission is to be a catalyst that excites America’s youth about math, science, engineering and technology. The NSC’s headquarters, Fort Discovery, is located on the scenic Riverwalk in downtown Augusta, GA. The 128,000 square-foot family-oriented math and science center fires the imaginations of children and adults with 250 hands-on exhibits, custom digital theater programs, portable planetarium, educational workshops and demonstrations as well as being the home-base for an array of national educational outreach programs. To learn more about NSC, visit www.NationalScienceCenter.org.

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http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=108454

I’m always looking for ways to become more effective as a teacher and find ways to make my lessons and lesson plans better. I found this article online and thought I’d post it. It’s a simple guide really but a good starting point for creating standards for eLearning or digital supplements to traditional course materials. The post comes from a sight called eLearningBrothers; they are a company that specializes in game based online training and eLearning. I’m a big fan of the game-based excercises and use SuperTeacherTools regularly. Here’s the article. http://bit.ly/64PlG1

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Thanks to all those who attended the recent “Using Technology to Enhance Your Teaching” workshop. I really enjoyed the session, especially hearing your stories about the technologies that you use in your teaching.

I’ve included all the materials used on the day and the mind map that we created from the activities that constitute your teaching.

The Slides

The Handout

The Mind Map

(Click on the image for the actual map)

George Veletsianos’s Slides

(see also George’s blog for more discussion in this area)

Some Reading
(See also http://delicious.com/tag/tech4training)

Handbook of Emerging Technologies”

Blogging with students… how and why

“Top 100 tools for learning 2009″

Tutorial on creating a blog and using RSS

Social Media Classroom – resources about teaching participatory media

How to create a blog with Blogger

7 things you should know about micro blogging

A write up of the “Twitter Experiment” – using twitter in a lecture setting

Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum

Second Life has its fair share of haters and often that is warranted. It is at times a clunky, unwieldy atmosphere with a high barrier to adoption. Businesses were early adopters and then quickly pulled their presence from the environment as it was difficult a return on their investment.

After the initial wave of adoption, we are settling into a period of overall decreased, but more concentrated use on Second Life. Less people using it more intensely. Or at least that is the ideal. Once the dust settles, we get a clearer picture of how useful the tool really is.

Gallagher Glenfadden, aka Michael Gallagher, running around The Globe Theatre on Second Life.

I was on the fence before regarding Second Life; it was a nice diversion, but I had yet to see any real usefulness. As I proceed through my Masters program(me) at the University of Edinburgh on e-learning development, I am starting to see some possibilities for education in that environment. We hold classes there occasionally, investigate different subjects, discuss, banter, and evolve (as avatars with presence). We build, we fly and teleport and all that jazz. Heady, interesting stuff.

I won’t go into too much detail as many of my original objections about Second Life still hold true (still resource intensive, clunky and high barriers to adoption). But it is nice to see that there are indeed practical opportunities that can be realized there (social opportunities for distance learners, communities on inquiry, at the very least reducing that sense of isolation one feels when studying distance programs).

All of that was a long-winded attempt to mention that our program made the BBC News cycle. We will be having a virtual graduation in Edinburgh for those who are unable to physically attend the graduation ceremonies.

So give the article a read. Virtual gowns and all.

But do take a look at the actual ceremonies below. I will most definitely be there in person if and when I do graduate. Either these people are graduating or this is a coronation ceremony. I love the ceremony involved.

And one more Second Life image for the road. There are limitations in Second Life, but appropriating emotive context is not one of them. You become emotionally involved and that spurs ownership and investment in this projection of self.

Gallagher drifting in time, virtual space and actual thought. Cue the Brian Eno music.

Google announced last week that they are introducing an automatic captioning facility for YouTube videos.  In the official Google blog they state that every minute 20 hours of video are uploaded.  The chances of each individual video owner taking the time and effort to caption each of their videos is unlikely.  It means that most user generated content on the video sharing site is inaccessible to people who are Deaf or hearing impaired.

It uses their own automatic speech recognition (ASR)  technology combined with the existing YouTube captioning system to automatically produce captions – auto-caps for short.  It is initially only available on a number of mainly educational channels.  Although ASR has been around for a while in the GoogleVoice application it has never been deployed on such a large-scale before.

An additional facility that has also been introduced is automatic timing.  If a video owner already has a transcript, they can upload this as a text file with the video and the software will automatically link the words in the transcript with the sounds on the video.

Both of these features are not only suitable for viewers with hearing difficulties but make content available in more languages.  The facility is only available in English but using the Google translation tool they can be translated into a number of languages.

Obviously this is not an exact science and mistakes are bound to occur but even with the problems, auto-caps is a major step forward in making all videos accessible.

Is that a torus? wow!

Ikea-wannabe chair designer Ener Hax was hoping to get Dream Walker to script some chairs but timing is everything (read: I should have gone to bed and not logged into the Level 2 Venue grid). =p

Sit scripts are basic scripts to use, but can be a pain to set up when placing in prims that have been cut, hollowed, rotated, spindled, or mutilated (showing my age and the old, old days of computer punch cards! and what is spindling anyway?)

Ener has been making a great collection of chairs for our new endeavor on our very own OpenSim grid hosted by Reaction Grid.

The goal is to create all the furniture needed for making “filming sets” for use in creating video for eLearning scenarios and video podcasts, and also furniture for use in corporate meetings and hotel events. Including details that help raise environmental awareness for meetings in the real world are part of everything we are building (Ener points out the “we” part of this sentence). =D

Apart from my love of eLearning, I taught college Environmental Science for 7 years and we have Matt Courtland from The Natural Strategy consulting with us for “best green practices” in meetings and events (see one of his blog posts on the greening of hotels).

Now for the LSL sit script, hopefully it helps, especially with rotation.

//place this sit script in a prim (poseball) or the root prim of a linked set
//adapted by David Miller - 23 November 2009
//
string text = "sit";
//what you would like the float text to say
//
default
{
    state_entry()
    {
       vector rot=<270, 0, 0>*DEG_TO_RAD;
       //rotation in degrees of avatar on Sit
       //negative values may also be used
       rotation finalRotation=llEuler2Rot(rot);
       //convert rotation
       llSitTarget(<0.2,0.55,-0.3>, finalRotation);
       //x, y, and z position of avatar on Sit
       //negative values may also be used
       //do not use <0,0,0>
       llSetSitText(text);
       llSetText(text,<1.0,1.0,1.0>,0.6);
       //first 3 values are colour of text
       //single value is text alpha - 1 is opaque, 0 is transparent
    }
    changed(integer change)
    {
       if (change & CHANGED_LINK)
       {
          if (llAvatarOnSitTarget() != NULL_KEY)
          {
             llSetText("",<1.0,1.0,1.0>,0.0);
             //hide string text on Sit
             //llSetAlpha(0, ALL_SIDES);
             //if this was a poseball, uncommenting the line above would
             //hide it on Sit
             //to uncomment a line, remove the double forward slashes //
          }
          else
          {
             llSetText(text,<1.0,1.0,1.0>,0.6);
             //restore string text on Stand Up
             //llSetAlpha(1.0, ALL_SIDES);
             //if this was a poseball, uncommenting the line above would
             //show it on Stand Up
             //to uncomment a line, remove the double forward slashes //
          }
       }
    }
}

Good thing Ener wears shorts!

reposted from the iliveisl blog

En Outlook 2003 ó 2007, puede buscar todos los mensajes enviados o recibidos de una persona, usando las Carpetas de búsqueda.

1. Haga clic en Carpetas de búsqueda
2. Presione el botón derecho
3. Seleccione Nueva carpeta de búsqueda…
4. Seleccione Con palabras específicas
5. Haga clic en el botón Elegir
6. Escriba la palabra a buscar
7. Haga clic en Agregar
8. Haga clic en Aceptar dos veces
9. Se crea una carpeta con todos los mensajes de esa persona que se pueden encontrar en la bandeja de entrada, elementos enviados, elementos eliminados, fuentes RSS

The following is a collection of reflections on the Web 2.0 Authoring Tools in Higher Education Learning and Teaching: New Directions for Assessment and Academic Integrity National Roundtable that I attended yesterday.

In summary, while I question some of the assumptions underpinning the roundtable the event was worthwhile in some of the people I met and some measure of reassurance. The reassurance was two fold

1. institutional; and
   Even with various problems and issues, CQUniversity isn’t really that far behind in getting its head around Web 2.0 (damning with faint praise as I didn’t see any other institutions who had made even half serious head way.
2. individually.
   The work I and other “lone rangers” have been involved with at CQUniversity has been just as good, and in many cases significantly ahead, of what other folk are doing.

It was particularly interesting to hear from this crowd of mostly educational folk that they are facing similar constraints, limitations and problematic relationships with IT.

Limitations of the roundtable

The organisers had gathered 30 odd people from across the higher education sector from various different backgrounds – mostly experience with using Web 2.0 and academic integrity – and were trying to collect that experience and distill out principles to guide some experiments they’ll be performing next year at Uni Melbourne, Monash and RMIT. This was to be done in one day with little or not pre-work apart from reading a discussion paper.

Given the constraints the organisers had to work within and what they were trying to achieve (getting some level of agreement out of a disparate group of academics), they did a pretty good job. However, I was left with some questions/observations:

• Given there was only time to two group breakout sessions, my interaction with participants was not complete. I felt that more time to become aware of the experiences and lessons learned from all the participants might have been helpful. But then, I found hearing about the experiences of others a major takeaway.
• Given the focus was Web 2.0 in assessment, the use of Web 2.0 to scaffold the workshop seemed somewhat limited. There was a wiki but it was set up fairly late and not used by many of the participants (one of the problems with more use of Web 2.0 would be getting participation) but there wasn’t a suggested twitter hash tag, there weren’t really any specific activities designed before, during or after the roundtable to use the wiki. The wiki was mostly used by session scribes.

What is Web 2.0? Should we use something else?

The use of the Web 2.0 term seemed to be somewhat problematic. At the least I and a few other attendees don’t particularly like the term for various reasons. But the main problem I had was that it was defined for the purposes of the roundtable to encompass a broad array of technologies for which it was impossible to generate general principles (even if you get over the questions I have about principles below). Are there specific principles for assessment that apply for Second Life, public blogs, twitter and a wiki within Blackboard?

Can we identify web 2.0 assessment specific principles?

Through out the roundtable I and many of the other participants (including the project staff) kept saying, “but how is that different from normal assessment”. That is, many of the principles that were being generated are principles that you (should) follow for all assessment, not just Web 2.0 in assessment. I can’t really recollect any principles that weren’t either:

1. general assessment principles, or
2. principles associated with the affordances of Web 2.0 tools.

Which led me to wonder whether or not there it is possible to generate principles for Web 2.0 use in assessment or whether it is a case of taking known assessment principles and combining them in contextually appropriate ways with good knowledge of the affordances of the specific Web 2.0 tools.

On reflection, drawing on the view of TPACK, it could be argued that there is specific knowledge here. That is, from a TPACK perspective you might argue that the combination of assessment principles and the technology affordances is itself a complex enough combination to be classed as specific knowledge. From this knowledge, you might well be able to identify something called general guidelines/advice (I’m still reluctant to use principles).

So, perhaps that’s a way forward. Rather than focus on the abstract and general Web 2.0 term. Focus on a specific tool (e.g. blogs). Specify what the affordances are of that tool. See how you can best combine those affordances with known assessment principles and derive guidelines from there.

An example from the blogosphere?

As I’m writing this a couple of folk have retweeted Mike Bogle’s blog post from today on blogs, reflection and learner-centered design. What I see in this post is a description of many of the affordances of blogs and how learning/assessment design might need to change to leverage those affordances effectively.

And in this paragraph

What is required though, is a fundamental rethinking of the idea of learning spaces to recognise distributed, learner-centric designs, and then having done that, a look at the available mechanisms – such as RSS and tagging – that will enable courses, programs or instructors to filter out only the content that is relevant to them and re-purpose it in a format that will streamline administrative, assessment, or grading requirements of the course.

Mike describes something similar to my first experiment with using open blogs for individual student reflection.

The rest of his post also reinforces for me one of the drawbacks and one of the difficulties encountered in this experiment. The drawback was that we didn’t design the assignment to encourage connections between students. We focused solely on the individual student blog as a way to make the learning visible to the staff member. I think encouraging (not necessarily requiring) student blog posts to be visible to other students would have opened up unexpected benefits. It may also have been somewhat difficult.

The difficulty in this experiment was that we didn’t change the mindset of the academic staff to meet the affordance of the technology the assignment design was trying to emphasise. The intent was to make student learning/development visible to staff, so they could engage and guide students. But the part-time staff weren’t used to and weren’t paid in ways that encouraged them to engage.

This idea needs more work

Difficulty with principles

In general I have a problem with principles. Especially principles that advise (not) to do something, but don’t provide any information about why this is a good/bad idea. Principles without the underlying theory or knowledge severely limit the ability for the principles to cross contexts. Each assessment item is occuring in a very different context and a principle that worked in one won’t necessarily translate easily to another context. You need the theory/knowledge underpinning it so you can decide whether it applies to your context and how it might need to be tweaked.

Then there’s the whole problem of e-learning being new. If, as Bates (2005) suggests, e-learning within higher education is still in its infancy, even after 10 years of LMS usage. What does this suggest for the use of Web 2.0. Infancy was a popular adjective for Web 2.0 for assessment at the roundtable.

So, if we’re still learning how to use it effectively, how can you generate principles?

Nutritionists and the chasm

It was my observation that all of the folk there yesterday talking about Web 2.0 were innovators or very early adopters. Folk on the left hand side of Moore’s chasm shown in the following image.

The majority of academics at universities are on the right hand side of the chasm. They are significantly different from the innovators. What excites them, what encourages them to change is significantly different. Moore (2002) and Geohegan (1994) have some specific things to say about the nature of this difference and the problems it poses for technology mediated learning.

Any of the principles from the roundtable are likely to be better suited for the innovators, not the majority. Hence, they are likely not to work.

The analogy I used in this blog post about super-fit, nutritionists generating principles for obese people to lose weight still resonates here.

Yet another fad

12 years ago I was told the Director of the Distance Education division at my then institution had said in a meeting something along the lines “The World-Wide Web will have little or no impact on distance education”. Last year, when the idea of Web 2.0 tools possibly offering an alternative to the LMS as the institutional response to e-learning another senior person said “That’s just an opinion.”. I was an early adopter of both the Web and Web 2.0. I saw the Division of Distance Education take control of web-based learning about 10 years ago and I fully expect the institution to leap onto Web 2.0 in the next couple of years.

At this stage, I see the use of Web 2.0 being yet another fad in technology mediated learning within universities. The focus will be on project managing the implementation of the technology with little or no notice that the entire policy, practice and structure of higher education is actively constraining innovative learning and teaching. For this reason, I don’t expect there to be any significant change or improvement in the pedagogy used in higher education through the introduction of Web 2.0. There will be too much herding cats, and not enough focus on creating an environment that enables weight loss.

References

Geoghegan, W. (1994). Whatever happened to instructional technology? 22nd Annual Conferences of the International Business Schools Computing Association, Baltimore, MD, IBM.

Moore, G. A. (2002). Crossing the Chasm. New York, Harper Collins.

Well, I’ve finally got a Google Wave invite! Now I’m just learning how it works. I can already see positive applications for teaching. Of course it’s still in preview, but when it starts properly it should be fantastic!

Anyway – I’ll try to keep posting updates on Wave.

Arturo Azcorra se centra en el uso de las TIC, en la educación presencial, teleducación síncrona y asíncrona. la perspectiva histórica mediante las herramientas comunicativas, desde la imprenta hasta los sistemas telemáticos actuales. Da ejemplos de varios sistema telemáticos utilizados en programas educativos.

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