i was recently reading Lankshear and Knobel’s piece on Facebook as an environment for multiliteracies (more on that over here). There is some disagreement around these social networking sites, that you must be self-centred to use them, or that they will damage your brain (eg this article).
At the recent ACE e-showcase, Michael Gwyther from YUM productions gave a great account of how they have used web2 technologies in one of their multimedia courses. Here’s the list of tools they’ve used: Blog Social Bookmarks (delicious) RSS Feeds Podomatic Slideshare Flickr Video RSS Feed reader! (Bloglines) The key for Michael is RSS feeds. As multiple students post their course reflections and assignments to their blog, he is able to read the updates from a single place .. his RSS feed reader. For a feed reader, i like google Read More …
Great initiative via Leigh Blackall over in Otago, NZ. He and Michael and Alex have been experimenting with a wild new concept known as the Point of View (POV) camera. Worn on glasses, or on a head torch, the gadget allows you to video exactly what you’re doing, hands-free. Not sure whether it has audio recording built in yet. (Check: yes it does.) What also caught my eye (and my similarity radar) was an article on Wired, where the law enforcement agencies are investigating similar options .. a wearable computer, Read More …
Just had a great meeting with the one and only Lynne Gibb from Coonara House. We started out in the new Access ACE Victorian elluminate room .. moved across to a new wiki near the e-showcase ACFE wiki .. and then realised we couldn’t edit the same wiki page at the same time. So moved over to google docs, where it was easier to collaborate, because the system is set up to auto-save the work of all people editing. Really great to watch someone else typing as they talk you Read More …
Our adult education co-ordinator at PRACE is looking to develop a flexible learning unit for the certificate ii in information technology – ie self-paced with support. i’ve had a thought to do some kind of blended digital imaging course using web applications and social software. However Robyn Jay says the Cert’s in IT are far too desktop-bound for that, and that we’re better off looking at communications skills or a media unit. i think we’re going to try and run it past the curriculum managers anyway (because we don’t have Read More …
Via amazing Rose inside the Australian flexible learning framework, a video with Top Ten Tips for success in e-learning innovations. (See my viewing notes further down the page.) Great to see Dora and Josie first up, and then Georgina coming in second, followed by Brad and Vanessa. All visionaries with the practical genius to get things done. Top Ten Tips for your E-learning Innovations Project in 2009 from E-learning Innovations on Vimeo. “Successful 2008 project participants share their advice on how to approach your 2009 Australian Flexible Learning Framework E-learning Read More …
Reflections on the session for Can You Hear Us? .. at the Converge08 e-learning conference (5Dec). The workshop went reasonably well. Really interesting people in the room, and many of the people there had used some kind of audio technologies .. including Skype, language laboratory setup, Wimba voice boards. i came up with a kind of jigsaw / find your partner activity, that i think went well and was fun. (Each person opens a wiki page with instructions for what to do. Eg some people have to wink .. and Read More …
Well .. Lisa continued her brave and valiant exploration of screencasting in the MYOB classroom, as part of the Can You Hear Us? project. And it’s still not as straightforward as we’d like it to be. We discovered a few more things about this program known as Jing. We already knew that the application would not run without a login. Now we know it’s a challenge to log yourself off the system .. for example when you’re on a public computer. Lisa’s had a go at recording the in-class on-screen Read More …
i’d be interested to get comments from anyone in ACE: is e-learning still out on the fringes, a strange and wacky add-on only for geeks? Or has it begun to come in from the cold? Is e-learning becoming part of the mainstream in ACE? For this live conference session (details below) Josie Rose started us off by leading some group brainstorming: what does ‘mainstreaming’ mean to you? On the whole, it was about normalising, acceptance, integration. Josie then spoke of the wonderful “e-mentor” program that she has pioneered, and which Read More …
Chris couldn’t do the whole research project, but i still wanted her to be involved; so we talked about how to use audio technologies with her very beginner, low literacy ESL learners. Filling in forms is a crucial survival skill, but the language is reasonably advanced. Chris’ students find it hard to remember written text or even recognise words on the page.. so we decided to prepare an audio CD allowing the text to be both on the page and on the CD player. She would have them do the Read More …