Trey’s E-Learning

Every now and then a friend or colleague will ask my advice about what computer-related equipment to buy. Increasingly their requests have involved Apple products like the Macintosh, iPod, and/or the iPhone.

Apple is a company known for secrecy, and yet Apple does exhibit some general patterns in terms of when they release new products. And it can be disappointing to buy something from Apple, and then have the company release an update or new product soon after your purchase.

So, in the spirit of successful shopping, here are two very helpful sites I use that track Apple products and historic release schedules to give you an idea of when new products are near release.

mactactic - buying guide

buyersguide.macrumors.com

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An outstanding former student of mine, Ryan Eash, sends along this link to an instructional design position with TechSmith, the makers of Jing and Camtasia Studio, among other products.

TechSmith Corporation - Career Opportunities

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Here’s an account of Abilene Christian University using a new tool to integrate their LMS with Facebook.

SIS to Facebook Direct. Introducing Schools on Facebook. at e-Literate

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Here’s a fantastic resource–a list of journals related to education, technology, psychology, and learning, by category. With, wait for it…, RSS feeds–and one OMPL file which will import them all in one fell swoop. Nice job you Aggies of Utah State!

On a site note, the USU IT department has been renamed as “Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences“–an interesting shift.

On another side note, their site is a nice instance of Drupal, using one of the cool themes from Roopletheme.com.

Journals in Ed Tech, etc. from ITLS @ USU

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I was at a conference this week and again heard a presenter state (as if it was a well-acknowledged fact) that people remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, etc.. Well, bull. And here’s an explanation of where this false statistic (urban legend) came from.

http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/10/people_remember.html

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A few running notes from the panel on the future of e-learning, here at the D2L user’s conference.

Note: Next time I should be ready to use CoverItLive or another live blogging tool.

Stephen Downes talks about open educational resources.
GNU license
Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org

attribution, non-commercial, no-derivatives, share-alike.
David Wiley OPL
http://opencontent.org/openpub/

Providing access to OER:
1. Institutional repositories: OAI, Dspace, the D2L repository.
2. Online storage

Sustainability:
1. institutional mandate
2. government funding (NSF)
3. volunteer community
4. contracted (public/private partnership)
5. foundation support
6. corporate support

Concern:
using LMS to create a cash cow of learner content. Analogous to college textbooks. What I’d like to see:
LMSs openly sharing with each other.

Barry Dahl talks about how he hopes laggards (faculty new to online teaching) don’t screw up online learning for the early adopters. And he hopes Congress doesn’t mess up online learning with requirements about authenticating the user

Much more. I stopped typing and just listened. The “projecting the backchannel on the big screen” experiment, while very entertaining, distracted both audience and panelists.

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Sorry if I’m late to this party, but I just “discovered” this journal when browsing through the Directory of Open Access Journals. And the latest volume is all about personal learning environments (PLEs).

elearningpapers

Personal learning environments
Today’s learning management systems can be perceived as islands – islands in the vast sea of learning possibilities the World Wide Web offers. Not only content can be obtained, refined and selected; learners can also adopt those tools which are important for their purposes, create their own and individual learning portals, tag content or register RSS feeds informing about news relevant to them.

The keyword web 2.0 makes it possible: Moving away from standard learning management systems (“one for all” technique) to Personalised Learning Environments (“one for me” technique) consisting of snips, bits and pieces, collections of tools and services which are bundled to individual and/ or shared landscapes of knowledge, experiences and contacts. It is a shift from the island paradigm of the LMS technique to understanding the web as a door, a portal to learning opportunities.

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Here’s a revealing account of one person’s experience taking an online university course, via eLearn Magazine:

eLearn: Feature Article

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Next time you’re off to a pointless meeting, or team-building exercise, consider these delicious motivational t-shirts:

DespairWear

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Here’s a nice beginner-level article from Yahoo News about why Gmail is an outstanding email service.

Get organized in Gmail - Yahoo! News

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