eLearning - A Reflective Synopsis

Get a Voki now!



In the first five weeks of the course we were introduced to a wide array of eLearning technologies and tools.These were broadly classified as "Teacher Delivery Technologies" and "Student Centred technologies".After going through the weekly course material and the supplied videos I was able to form a better opinion of how these tools can be deployed to enrich the learning experience for both the students and teachers in the modern classroom.Below I will be discussing some of the technologies I found are already having a major impact on the way how course and content are being created and delivered today in educational institutions around the world.Some of these technologies are:

Blogs

A blog is a type of website that allows individuals to comment, describe, review or voice their opinion on the Internet in the form of ‘posts’ which are displayed usually in reverse chronological order. Blogs can either be personal diaries or focus on a particular subject or a news story.Blogging has been one of the key defining technologies of the Web 2.0. In education teachers and students can use a Blog as a space to communicate, share and reflect on the selected course. The main advantages of using a Blog are:

• Develop analytical thought process/writing skills – Blogs are an effective way to develop vital thought and express it in crafty words.
• Brainstorming Tool/ Thinking outside the box – Blogs can encourage creative and intuitive thinking by helping students to comment and give feedback on a particular topic.
• Time/Place shift –this means that blogs make it possible to learn and share regardless of location or time zone.

WIKI

A WIKI is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor (Encyclopædia Britannica, no date).In the realm of education WIKIs are a very powerful tool that gives students the central control of creating and modifying information. The key benefits of a WIKI are:

• Collaborative learning – Students participate in contributing content on a course or subject with the ability of the WIKI to keep track of revision dates
• Peer review – Students can help each other by correcting and/or suggesting the right ideas
• Promote teamwork and enhance leadership skills

Learning Management System (LMS)

LMS is a centralized classroom style teaching system that according to our course website “delivers content, manages assessment, provides communication forums and virtual collaboration spaces for students.” In fact I would like to view LMS as an umbrella term that incorporates many tools that can be used by educators for content delivery. An educator would use a LMS for :

• Assessment and Testing
• Asynchronous eLearning
• Collaborative Learning
• Course content distribution

Interactive Whiteboards

Perhaps the most fascinating addition to any modern classroom is the Interactive Whiteboard that allows a multi-dimensional approach to teaching by projecting elements such as text and images onto a traditional whiteboard or a display panel. These elements can be manipulated in a very interactive way giving the student more control and a hands on learning experience. Interactive Whiteboards can be very useful for:

• Developing rich educational content for presentation to the students
• Work collaboratively on a shared task to promote group work
• Enhancing the learning capacity for students with special needs and enabling them to use application tools to create their own content
• Introduction to ICT from an early age
• Stimulate creative thinking in young children
• Interactive tests or assessments to provide instant learning feedback

e.Portfolio

Using an e.Portfolio like Mahara, students and teachers can showcase their accomplishments for career-related purposes. It can also be a collection of course — or discipline — related plans, strategies, and artefacts to be shared with colleagues, which often encourage improved teaching and learning (Lorenzo & Ittelson, 2005, pp. 2‑3).In education an e.Portfolio has distinct advantages in:

• Encouraging communication among teachers, pupils and parents
• Create rich content by the incorporation of multimedia characteristics
• Indentifying the strong and weak points within an individual
• e.Portfolios can help students learn information and technology literacy skills and how to use digital media (Lorenzo & Ittelson, 2005, p. 3)

Podcasting

Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the Internet using either RSS or Atom syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers. The term podcast, like "radio", can mean both the content and the method of delivery. Podcasters' websites also may offer direct download of their files, but the subscription feed of automatically delivered new content is what distinguishes a podcast from a simple download or real-time streaming (Wikipedia, 30 December 2009).Some of the major advantages I see in podcasting are :

• The ability to learn anywhere,anytime
• Reach a larger audience
• Allows course maetrial to be covered more thoroughly as there are no time constraints

With the rapidly changing technological horizon,teachers and students will no doubt find themselves having to grapple with even more technologies and tools in the near future.This could cause hindrance and a reluctance on some to embrace further new developments in eLearning technology.Hence,a stable framework is needed to maintain a coherent relationship between different technological eLearning tools.Personally my stable picks would be the use of LMS,Blogs and Podcasting as the three fundamental must have tools in any teachers kit.However,the most omportant goal of using any eLearning technology must be the simplification of content creation and delivery for teachers and a shorter learning curve for the students.

References:
1. Lorenzo, G. & Ittelson, J. (2005). An Overview of E‑Portfolios. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, edited by Diana Oblinger. Available at http://educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3001.pdf (last accessed 29/12/2009).

2. "wiki". Encyclopædia Britannica. 1. London: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 2007. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192819/wiki. (Accessed 31/12/2009).

3. Boston College. (no date). Benefits of Using Wikis in the Classroom. Retrieved 14/12/2009 from http://ideasweb.bc.edu/wikisintheclassroom

eLearning 2.0 - Part 1

The advent of the Internet opened up new vistas for learning. The act of learning is a constant common denominator in our life and it suddenly seemed more accessible content-wise and easy to share with the Internet. As the Internet evolved from its humble beginning into this phenomenon we call the World Wise Web today in the labs at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research ) so did its purpose. At first scientists sent simple one liners over the network, then when they were able to “jack up” the bandwidth they could send and share vital scientific data and analysis. The reason I'm making this very point is because I see the inherent role the Internet has played in helping spread information and content available to a geographic audience.

So in order for us to understand what eLearning 2.0 is, we first need to track the metric classification of the Internet itself as it is the underlying medium of propagation for online education. The current Internet age we currently are in is tentatively called Web 2.0.There is no formal current definition for Web 2.0 but it is a collection of trends that are having a profound impact on the way we interact and conduct ourselves online. Some of these trends (the major ones anyway) are:

• Software Services –
  It is the ability to run software applications online usually within a web browser. There are myriad online word processing applications such as writeboard and Google Docs.These are nothing but standard software delivered online using the Internet as the medium instead of running as stand-alone applications on a PC.
  


• Collective Intelligence –
  The Internet is a network of linked WebPages and Websites that hold incredible amounts of user data and their browsing habits. The ability to make use of this data to connect people and enable them to collaborate or share information, ideas or views is called Collective Intelligence. Online retailers profile visitor shopping habits and target them with specific products or specials. Wikipedia, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, del.icio.us....etc all make use of this concept.
  


• Create and Publish content –
  This is the "Read-Write Web" which has empowered netizens to create content and publish it via blogs or wikis. The content can be text or media like photos (Flickr),videos (Youtube),audio (imeem) or podcasts. This was a major transition from the previous web 1.0 which was pretty much static in terms of user participation.
  


• Feeds & Tags –
  Once an online community is created it is always a challenge to keep updates on fellow members. This becomes increasingly a problem in social networking websites where the flow of information is short (status updates) and constant. Feeds also known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) are nothing but software aggregators that pull content from subscribed domains and pass it to the subscriber in a consolidated form. Feeds can be text or complex media e.g podcasting feeds or social network bookmarks (Diigo)
  


• Widgets and Custom Applications –
  Perhaps the most important Web 2.0 advance in my opinion has been the way how applications are developed. Applications post Web 2.0 are modular in design, meaning they can be developed as small modules and plugged into a variety of combinations with other applications or websites. For example a real estate website would use a Google Map module to display the geographic location of the selected property. This has given birth to the user widget community where users with minimal programming knowledge can build powerful widget applications using pre-built frameworks. Facebook provides a Software Developer Kit (SDK) which users can download and build powerful applications around the Facebook platform framework.

The journey to where we are today has been arduous and it has been the ingenuity of countless innovators, whiz kids and geniuses that have brought us to this moment where we as a civilization are on the cusp of a renaissance in the Information age. Next in Part 2 I will be discussing/defining what eLearning 2.0 is all about. Stay tuned folks !

References:
1. Web 2.0 Image retrieved 18/12/2009 from http://blogs.voices.com/thebiz/web_20/

Social E-Learning

Social Learning is a theory based on the premise that within a social context people learn from one another through observation, imitation and modeling. Its main proponent is Albert Bandura. Many organizations use social learning to enhance or supplement conventional training methodologies.



Kids and young adults often learn quickly through observation and to reinforce this methodology in the Internet age many new social learning Web 2.0 start-ups have sprung in the past two years. But the key to the success of these e-learning (social) sites is content. These online communities of learning are having a dramatic impact on the way people learn and apply that knowledge in the real world. Some examples of these start-ups are:

Cramster - Its website describes it as “an online study community of students, educators and subject enthusiasts. Cramster adopts a freemium model, allowing most members to use services for free”. Furthermore, the tagline on the website reads “Ace your classes with the help of Cramster.com’s online study community...”

CampusBug – it is the world’s first social learning network of students and educators. It is often described as Myspace meets Yahoo Answers. Users can socialize but also create academic tools to help them(socialmediaanswers.com).

Tutorvista – provides online tutoring using an interactive whiteboard. It also provides educational and training content to organizations .Students can also practice and study for entrance exams to get into universities.I once happened to take an introductory class with them which is offered free as a trial and found the online software they used as exceptionally advanced.However,the limitation of broadband speeds in Australia made latency and frequent cutoffs a headache.

Some other examples of this trend are displayed in the image below –



Most of these online sites use virtual classrooms to deliver formatted content.With improving broadband speeds and efficient web application services virtual classroom learning or training is no longer seen as an inferior alternative to real world teaching.However,it remains to be seen whether all these start-ups are the real deal or just another bubble that will end up bursting and lead to consolidation in the E-learning sector.I prefer consolidation as it will provide a more ripe and superior E-learning model with tried and tested methodologies that work.


References:
1. Kevin Palmer: Review of Campus Bug. Retrieved 11/12/2009 from http://socialmediaanswers.com/review-of-campus-bug/
2. Social Learning Image retrieved 10/12/2009 from http://www.internationalfuturesforum.com/
3. E-Social Image retrieved 10/12/2009 from http://lh5.ggpht.com/

ALPHA !

Well here we are,my first blog post.Took me quite a while to decide on the blog layout,colors and fonts.I was never really fond of the template choices offered by BLOGGER and somewhere in the midst I embarked to create my own blog template which went awfully haywire as I discovered that BLOGGER doesn't like anyone playing around with its' intrinsic Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),hence much to my frustration and disenchantment,I had to abandon that effort and settle down with this dark template which I thought was the least funny and meant business.

Nonetheless,now that we are here - Welcome to my Blog! As I come across "interesting" E-learning stuff or if "interesting" E-learning stuff came across my mind,I'll post my musings here.

This subject is also of very special importance to me because I am involved in an E-learning project.The focal point of the project is an 'E-Classroom' software that is being developed to enable overseas students to gain an acceptable level of proficiency in the English language prior to commencing their professional education in Australia and later on around the world.Although I am not at the liberty to disclose too much information due to party agreements and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) I still hope to bring new information to the table and discuss bleeding-edge technologies that are being developed and deployed around the world in the quest for perfecting the holy grail of educational excellence. This is a journey, not a destination.

"I have failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed." - Michael Jordan