Delicious & Nutricious.

I’ve been using Delicious for about 18 months now. I got really worried when Yahoo said they were no longer going to invest in it as I had become so reliant on it.  I was therefor relieved when those nice guys at Facebook said they were taking over ownership of the service and that Delicious would be with us for some time to come. God help me when it does eventually go, as all my favourite sites are stored in it. So do I use the social side of it. Has it helped me build community of practice. Frankly, no. I’ve struggled with the concept of social bookmarking from the outset.

Let em try try to explain Delicious with this short video from the guys at CommonCraft

OK, so if you’ve watched that, you should now understand what Delicious is. I think that one think that doesn’t come across clearly in the video is the benefit of being able to access you bookmarks anywhere. This is so cool. I can find a web site at work, tag it with delicious, and when I get home that evening, it’s there, on my PC at home… Magic. Of course, I’ve got both my PC at home and at work configured with the delicious plug-in and logging in automatically with my account. But that just makes it a little easier. I’ve actually been camping with friends, and in the middle of a field, on somebody else’s laptop been able to log-on to my Delicious account and show them an interesting site that I previously book marked.

The tagging side is pretty cool as well. Imagine that you are as obsessive compulsive as I am, and that you have you CD collection (yes, stop laughing I still have CD’s) ordered by genre. You buy a Bonny Raitt CD. Now do you file it in the Blues section, or the Country section. Trust me, Mr Sod say’s that whichever section you file it in, when you come to look for it in 6 months time; you’ll look in the other section. Wouldn’t it be nice if the CD could exist in both sections, so that you can always find in. In essence, this is what Delicious tagging does. It allows you to file you web pages under multiple one word tags so that whatever way you try to find it in the future, chances are, it’ll be there. So, for instance, I’d tag the Bonny Raitt home page (http://www.bonnieraitt.com/) with Blues, Country, Western, Music, and it would exists in my delicious bookmarks in all those categories at the same time. For those of you who are asking who the hell is Bonny Raitt, have a look at this……

So what of the social side. Does it Build community of practice? I suspect not. Sure, it’s a way of sharing bookmarks, but frankly, I’ve come across very few people who use it in this way. Some Academic Skills Tutors at the University of Huddersfield, publicise their bookmarks to students in order that they can access the same online resources, but I think that’s about where it stops. Somebody who I respected in the field of Learning Technology once gave me their delicious site. I actually found it easier to search for my own web resources that to trawl through somebody else’s bookmarks. I’d be happy to be proved wrong on this (please comment if you feel the urge), but there is little that I’ve seen on delicious that allows community to build other than a sharing of tagged sites. Perhaps it can support an existing community of practice. Interactivity is low – bookmark a site, tag it, end of story, so no message loop here (Yacci). Look pretty grim when we map it onto Laurillards model as well.  However. Just because a web 2.0 tool is not particularly interactive or builds community of practice, doesn’t mean it’s rubbish.  I’d be lost without it on a work. personal and educational level. As a student, I find I tend to use other tools such as Mendelay for keeping track of my resources as that fits much better with me academic writing requirements, but Delicious has its place. Let’s not knock it….

Refs

Laurillard, D. 2002, Rethinking university teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies, RoutledgeFalmer, London.

Yacci, M., 1999. Interactivity Demystified: A Structural Definition for Distance Education and Intelligent CBT. , (1996), pp.1-18.

Rockin’ Robin

All the little birdies on Jaybird Street
Love to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet

Twitter. ….Now we are Rockin’

Is it interactive?                                       Yes Indeedy
Does it facilitate community of Practice?   Yes Indeedy

  Robin, a photo by Darrellh2000 on Flickr.

 

OK, now I need to put my money where my mouth is. Twitter is a micro-blogging site. You type in a post of no more than 140 characters, and the whole world can see it.  In effect, what happens if you pick interesting people and subscribe to their posts, a little bit like an RSS feed, and they in turn, may or may not subscribe to your posts. It encourages community of practice. You seek out the people with post about subjects that are of interest to you. Chances are:  you too will post about subjects of interest to them. Because you often end up with mutual following, there are times when Twitter can be used as a kind of texting service for question and answers. For instance, I follow a whole load of people who are interested and actively engaged in Learning Technologies. I needed on online survey tool for an Action Research project I was undertaking.  I tweeted “Can anybody recommend and easy to use free online survey tool?” I got about 10 tweets back within 5 minutes, from which I was able to choose an appropriate tool for the task in hand. Likewise, I’m able to contribute to questions asked by other people in the industry, and also to contribute resources, and even a link to my blog. This all helps to generate a really feeling of community.

The twitter web site states that “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple

question: What are you doing?”.  However Dunlop & Lowhenthal (2009) very succinctly summarise by stating that “The people who participate in the Twitter community, however, use it for more than providing updates on their current status. In 140 characters or less, people share ideas and resources, ask and answer questions, and collaborate on problems of practice”

A friend of my nephew’s the other day said something that made me think. She said that Facebook was “look at my wonderful life” and twitter was “look at how clever I am”. It made me smile because there is an element of truth in it. It does fit the developing socio-cultural trend of self publication and self promotion.

So how can we use twitter in an educational context? Grosseck & Holotescu (2010) identify a number of ways in which microblogging can be used for teaching an learning. These include:

• Hosting learning and practice communities
• Exploring collaborative writing
• Project management
• Evaluating Opinions
• Supporting conferences and events
• Building a Personal Learning Network

Possibly the two key used here are those of Hosting learning and practice communities and Building a Personal Learning Network. This first function links in so closely with the concept of community of practice as to be indistinguishable, and the benefits to learning are well document. Wenger (1998) summarises early in his book by stating that “learning is an issue of engaging in and contributing to the practices of their communities” The Building of the PLN (Personal Leaning Network) is becoming an increasingly important part of the learning process. Indeed Tobin (1998) stresses the importance of PLN’s for giving us pointers to sources of information, answers to questions, coaching, reinforcement and practical help in applying our learning to real life situations.

I’m afraid I’m going to hark back to Yacci (1999), and see how Twitter maps onto his model for interactivity. Here we start to realise that tweets often result in a message lop instigated from the learners perspective. The content learning is the information supplied in the tweet and the affective benefits are the social presence that Twitter affords. Mutual coherence, like any conversation varies from interaction to interaction

So, there we go. I rest my case.  In summary: Twitter is interactive, it also fosters community of practice and it can be used in a variety of teaching and learning scenarios.  Whether out learner engage with it, or see it just as a tool for following Stephen Fry is another matter and a good subject for another blog post someday.

Daniel R. Tobin, 1998. Personal Learning Network. Available at: http://www.tobincls.com/learningnetwork.htm [Accessed November 4, 2011].

Dunlop, J.C. & Lowhenthal, P.R. (2009). Instructional Uses of Twitter . Chapter 8:45-50 in CU Online HandBook. Teach differently. Create and Collaborate, Edited by Patrick R. Lowenthal, David Thomas, Anna Thai, Brian Yuhnke, University of Colorado Denver.

Grosseck, G. & Holotescu, C., 2010. Microblogging multimedia-based teaching methods best practices with Cirip.eu. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(2), pp.2151-2155. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S187704281000337X [Accessed September 16, 2011].

Yacci, M., 1999. Interactivity Demystified page 1. , (1996), pp.1-18.

YouTube, MeTube, UsTube, TeachTube

Is YouTube interactive? Does YouTube build a community of practice? Does it have a place in our teaching materials?

Let’s have a look at what YouTube does. It streams on demand video submitted by users like me and you. You’ll find a whole plethora of different type of video on there. Music video, funny animals, people falling over, car crashes, homemade videos , animations, music mashups, videos taken at gigs, and a whole load of videos that defy categorisation. You try and categorise this viral video of a chubby kid singing the cupcake song.

So, at first sight, YouTube seems to be a site for fun. However, on closer inspection, there are some fantastic instructional video on there. Want to learn how to knit? Go to YouTube. Want to learn how to play Blues guitar. Go to YouTube. Want to learn how to use Camtasia Studio. Go to YouTube.

There are a many people in the world with a specific area of expertise who are willing to share that expertise with the internet community. Now that in itself is really interesting. We’re living in a time where self publication is easy. YouTube can bring fame and fortune (new bands, animators, video editors), and it’s somewhere where you can showcase your talents easily to a global audience. Why therefore do people upload educational videos? Perhaps, like all educators they are driven by the desire to help people, to allow people to progress, and also in some of our cases, the desire to look pretty damn clever…

YouTube is brilliant. It’s my first port of call when I get stuck with a piece of software. If I need to know how to add a transparent background to an image in Gimp, YouTube is where I go. Ok, so it’s some annoying 12 year old American kid with a really whiney accent that’s showing me how to do it, but I find it much easier to learn from a video where I can see exactly what to click and what to select in the software than from a set of written instructions. I’m not proud. I’m happy to learn for a 12 year old kid.

So let’s have a look at the interactivity of videos first. Dianna Laurillard  (2002, p103) claims that video are not truly interactive and that this label is only applied as it is possible to pause and rewind the video in order to carry out exercises, reflection and analytical activities between viewings. Woo et al (2008,p82) confirms this view point, claiming that instruction video is a one way medium of communication. Indeed, when we overlay video onto Yacci’s model of interactivity, and also Laurillard’s conversational framework, it becomes clear that video is a one way medium. That doesn’t mean that it is no good as a teaching tool. For a start, online video is time independent. Many papers have been written extolling the virtues of time independent instructional video. Sugar et al state that “learners can view a particular screencast at their own convenience and multiple times, if desired”. This allows students to make notes, rather than take notes, as they can always refer back to the video. That is bound to foster a more intrinsic and deeper understanding of the subject matter.

We also need to look at some of the other benefits video brings. Laurillard discusses how video techniques such as pan and zoom can supplant cognitive processes, and Yacci talks about the value of paralanguage. Video can convey paralanguage. Watch Question Time any week, and you can see that the body language of the panel says as much if not more than their words. The use of video techniques (and let’s face fact, there are a lot more techniques available than just pan and zoom), the paralanguage of the subjects and the very fact that the video imagery brings situations to life (no pictures or words can illustrate the mayhem and violence of a London riot like a video can), and we have a very important teaching tool. Perhaps we should be taking a leaf out of Wesch’s (2009) book and not just utilising the video that is already available, but looking to create out own video material. Like Wesch, perhaps we “should approached a project by thinking of trying to create a visual of it”

What about community of practice. YouTube not only allows you to upload and watch videos, but also provide feedback on the videos via comments. Does this build a community? I suspect not. I’ve looked at the comments. There are the odd bits of banter, thanks, comments on quality and content and a fair bit of trolling, but no signs of community. Renninger and Shumar (2002) talk extensively about the splintering of subgroups in virtual communities and how successful large online communities can be victims of their own success, resulting in members graduating away to form their own online communities. Perhaps thsi happens in Youtube, or perhaps the user base is just too large and diverse to develop into an collaborative community of practice.

Ah – Yes….. One final thing we need to bear in mind is the distracting nature of YouTube. I know from my own experience that I can go on to YouTube with the internet of learning how to achieve a task in a pice of software. 2 hours later, after having watched music videos, Lol cats and people falling of bicycles, I’m not the wiser. If we can, embedding the YouTube videos into our learning environment is a preferable option in order to minimise distraction to the learners.

 Refs

Laurillard, D. 2002, Rethinking university teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies, RoutledgeFalmer, London.

Michael Wesch 2009, “A Sense of Purpose”, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 8

Renninger, K.A. & Shumar, W. 2002, Building Virtual Communities, Cambridge University Press.

Woo, Karen, Gosper, Maree, McNeill, Margot, Preston, Greg, Green, David, & Phillips, Rob. (2008). Web-based lecture technologies: blurring the boundaries between face-to-face and distance learning. Alt-J, 16(2), 81-93. doi: 10.1080/09687760802315895

Yacci, M., 1999. Interactivity Demystified: A Structural Definition for Distance Education and Intelligent CBT. , (1996), pp.1-18.

 

Tied Up and Tied In

Here’s what I don’t like about Flickr. It ties you in. The functionality if gives you is pretty good. You can upload High Resolution images that you have created. You can tag them, you can organise them, you can share them. Fantastic. I used it recently to upload all my photos from my nieces wedding so that she could select the best to produce and informal album. She lives in Hollywood, California.

But more of the tying in. You can create a free account on Flickr. It allows you to upload as many photos as you want, but limits you to 2 videos and 300MB of photos / month. It also only allows you to view the last 200 photos you have uploaded. So, at first this sounds pretty cool. You start uploading and sharing photos. Pretty soon, you start to hit the limitations of the free account. What’s the solution? Upgrade to a Pro-account for $24.95 a year. That’s about £16 (at the moment). I personally have a problem with this kind of marketing. Sucking you into a free service, getting you to commit you allegiances and then trying to charge you to make the service viable. Ok, we have a choice, we can chose not to use the service at all, accept the limitations of the free service or upgrade to the Pro Account. I’m just not a big fan of this kind of marketing. Often it’s so difficult and time consuming to migrate your content away that we all too readily pay the price to upgrade.  It’s a common marketing ploy these day, especially with internet services, and often we fall for it hook line and sinker. Many software programs are free to try, with a reduced functionality or time locked. We try them, get sucked in, become reliant on them, and then we have to pay. Is it a reflection on today’s society that we have come to view this sales technique as acceptable. Or are we all so greedy that we just want the free service, grab everything free that we can and then pay the price later on.

Anyway: enough of the ranting of a grumpy old man. Let’s look at the service itself. I love the ability to be able to integrate Flickr with my blogs and other social network sites. I love the ability to be able to organise my photos into sets. I love the ability to be able to tag my photos so that I and other people can find relevant images easily. I love the ability to be able to search through the creative commons sections (here) really easily in order that I can use appropriate imagery legally in my teaching materials. All in all, photo sharing is brilliant. The creators of Flickr actually started the photo sharing site as an add on to a multiplayer gaming site. The image sharing took off while the multiplayer game died. I think that demonstrates the value of image sharing.

I could bring in loads of theory here to justify why using imagery in teaching material is a good thing, but I’d only be repeating myself. I suggest you have a good read of me last post (A Picture Paints a Thousand Words) or have a really good read of Mayer (2003). In summary, Mayer (2003, p127) states that “The promise of multimedia learning is that, by combining pictures with words, we will be able to foster deeper learning in students”. You don’t get much more succinct than that, but the paper makes a good read and provides a good theoretical framework for incorporating images and other multimedia into out teaching material to deepen learning.

Long live Flickr – just make it free OK…….

Refs

Mayer, R., 2003. The promise of multimedia learning: using the same instructional design methods across different media. Learning and Instruction, 13(2), pp.125-139. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0959475202000166

breaking free, a photo by breahn on Flickr.

A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

OK, let’s pitch in with the legal stuff first and get it out of the way. When you create anything original (picture, video, program, poetry, written word, images), the copyright automatically belongs to you. That is unless; you are working for somebody else and have given up ownership of your work. If you work for a commercial company the copyright of anything you produce in works time will normally be owned by that company (normally detailed in the small print of you terms and conditions). It appears that there is some debate over teaching materials. Most universities believe that if a teacher has created materials while being employed by the university, the copyrights belong to the university. Try telling that to teaching staff….. Anyway, that’s a debate for another time. Let’s look at Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is a way of relaxing the copyright on a piece of original work that you own. You can retain control of the copyright while allowing other to use it. In short it is a quick an easy way of allowing your work to be used by others for the purpose of collaboration and (let’s be honest here) self promotion. Creative commons allows you to decide exactly how your original work can be used, and also who can use it.

I am guilty of occasionally searching for a really good illustration on the internet to incorporate into my teaching material or to enhance somebody else teaching material on their behalf. I challenge any of you to deny that you have not done the same: you’ve found am image so poignant that regardless of who owns it, you’ve incorporated into your PowerPoint. From an educator’s perspective Creative Commons is fantastic. It now allows us to incorporate relevant multimedia into out course material, safe in the knowledge that we are operating within the law. From a learners perspective, it’s also a bonus allowing the incorporation of relevant multimedia into assessment. Of course, that very much relies on us as educators explaining the rules and ensuring that our learners abide by them.

So, we’ve determined that Creative Commons allows us to legally incorporate multimedia into our teaching material. Why do we need to do this. What benefits does it bring. Nguyan & Clark (2005) refer to cognitive load theory which states that the limited capacity of our short term memory renders it capable of only effectively handling so much information at one time. They profess that overloading students with information will only serve to overload their sort term memory and have a detrimental effect on learning and understanding. Come on, we’ve all been there is a classroom, and all we want to do is stick our hand up and say “Please Miss, can I go home now, my brain is full. One might conclude that presenting students with multimedia may overload there short term memory ‘cos we’re stimulating and feeding them with information through various sense all at the same time. Quite frankly, the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. Witt and Schrodt (2010) talk about the close relationship between media richness theory and multimedia and state that “multimedia technologies such as PowerPoint or video clips provide a richer classroom communication context than spoken lectures alone”. This is backed up by Moneta and Kekkonen-Moneta (2007) and further supported by Mayer’s (2003) multimedia theory, which indicates that students gain a deeper level of leaning from explanations from that use words and pictures rather than words alone.  We also need to consider the socio-cultural context of today’s learners. The internet has become an important aspect of most people’s lives. From looking up the odd thing on Wikipedia to online banking, shopping and don’t let’s forget educating ourselves. There is a plethora of information out there on the web which is accessed frequently by adult and younger learners alike. Do we access web pages full of words. No! We access information that is delivered in a variety of media. Pictures, Video, Audio Files. It’s all there. Why then should we expect learners to give up that rich multimedia experience when they enter our lectures/lesson/courses. We shouldn’t.

It’s our job to ensure that our teaching material is rich with appropriate and effective multimedia to foster engagement and deepen learning. Creative Commons helps us to find and legally use those images, videos and  resources that were previously hard to incorporate. Hurrah for Creative Commons!!!!!

Refs

Mayer, R. (2003). The promise of multimedia learning: using the same instructional design methods across different media. Learning and Instruction, 13(2), 125-139. doi: 10.1016/S0959-4752(02)00016-6.

Moneta, G. B., & Kekkonen-Moneta, S. S. (2007). Affective Learning in Online Multimedia and Lecture Versions of an Introductory Computing Course. Educational Psychology, 27(1), 51-74. doi: 10.1080/01443410601061413.

Nguyen, F. and Clark, R.C. (2005), “Efficiency in e-learning: proven instructional methods for faster, better online learning”, Learning Solutions, available at: http://www.clarktraining.com/ articles.php (accessed July 9, 2008).

The Virtual Paper Boy

I’m no stranger to RSS. For years I’ve been subscribing to a number of feeds through Google Reader. It’s brilliant. In the old days, I had to go looking for information that was of interest to me. Now it comes looking for me! I always liken RSS to newspaper delivery. Imagine  that you discover that the content of the Guardian is generally interesting and relevant to you. What do you do. Do you go down to the newsagents every morning to but a copy. No. Because some mornings, you may want a lie in, or it’s raining heavily, or you frankly just can’t be bothered with the walk. What you do is you get the paper boy to deliver it to your door. What way, you never miss anything. RSS is the information super highway equivalent to a paper boy.  Only it’s better! You can search around the internet a find a plethora of information that is syndicated (that means that the  virtual paper boy can deliver it to you). And better still, most of it is free.  Let’s not forget that the information that can be delivered to you comes in a variety of multimedia formats: – Blog feed, News Feeds, Podcasts, Video. Try getting your newsagents to deliver that little lot

So how does RSS fit in with educational theory. Well the first thing I need to look at is the quantity of information that RSS bombards us with. I started off by subscribing to all sorts of feed. Problem was, I subscribed to too much. I ended up missing things that were important, or just plainly felt overwhelmed by the amount of daily reading I needed to do.  Oud (2009, p166) refers to cognitive load theory and claims that multimedia can place a high demand on short-term memory, but this can be minimised by simplifying content and removing unnecessary material. I propose that the same principals apply to RSS. Subscribe only to those feeds that you know you will read regularly. Subscribe to feeds that are succinct and relevant, otherwise you’ll start to tire of wading through the chaff to get to the wheat.

And what of interactivity and Community of Practice. Let’s look at interactivity first. I’m not convinced in my heart of heart that RSS facilitates interaction. Muirhead & Juwah (2003, p13) look at the different types of interaction as defined by Sims (1995). In reality, RSS only maps onto Linear Interactivity (also known as page turning). Perhaps there is more interactivity to be gained from RSS, but it’s predominantly through the media that it is delivered to your doorstep.  For instance an RSS delivered blog post may present the opportunity for interaction through dialogue facilitated by ability to leave comments.  A news feed or podcast may have no mechanism to allow feedback and dialogue. So does RSS facilitate community of practice. Similarly, I’d also argue that RRS does not actively promote community of practice. It does however facilitate gathering the shared  “shared repertoire of communal resources (Wenger 2000, p229) which in turn allows to engage with the community. Perhaps it also addresses the Imagination mode of belonging (Wenger 2000, p227) by allowing us to construct an image of our community and reflect an explore within the  context of the information it provides.

Like the internet, RSS is a delivery mechanism and as such doesn’t provide interactivity or community of practice. Like the internet however, it facilitates both of these by allowing easy access to relevant and informed content

Refs

Muirhead, B. & Juwah, C., 2004. Interactivity in computer-mediated college and university education : A recent review of the literature Pre-Discussion Paper. Teaching in Higher Education, 7, pp.12-20.

Oud, J., 2009. Guidelines for effective online instruction using multimedia screencasts. Reference Services Review, 37(2), pp.164-177. Available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/00907320910957206 [Accessed October 21st, 2011].

Sims, R. (1995). Interactivity: A Forgotten Art? Instructional Technology Research Online. Available: http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwitr/docs/interact/

Wenger, E., 2010. Coomunities of Practice and Social Learning Systems. October.

 

Comments on Conversation

I’ve just spent a good couple of hours playing around with Dianna Laurillard’s Conversational Framework. I’ve played with the web resources at http://www2.smumn.edu/deptpages/~instructtech/lol/laurillard/ which 2 weeks ago I would have referred to as an interactive model. Now I’m not so sure. Although there are buttons to press which change what the model displays to you, it doesn’t fulfil Yacci’s definition of interactivity.

1. It’s not a message loop.
2. Because it’s not a loop, the interactivity doesn’t occur from my (the learners) point of view
3. It does fulfil the criteria of producing content learning. I’m not so sure that this model bring me any affective benefits.
4. It tries its best to be mutually coherent, but there are some preconceptions about my level of understanding of some of the terms it uses.

In short, I had to refer back to Laurillard’s book (Rethinking University Teaching) to gain a deeper understanding of the model. Perhaps I need to reassess my own perception of what is interactive and what is not. Perhaps this online model is more an adaptive narrative. Now I’m upset. I always though that the exhibits in the Science Museum were interactive. If I think carefully about it now though, all I did as a kid was run round at break-neck speed pushing all the buttons and winding all the handles just to see what happened. I don’t think that I actually learnt much from the displays, but it was great fun.

Having read the chapter on Interactivity in Laurillard’s book, and played with the online model, I have couple of criticisms.

Number 1 on my list is that the model is not very accessible. That is, it’s really complicated….. I truly believe that if you put this model down in front of teachers who only wanted to improve their eLearning resources, you would be met with blank stares of instant disengagement. In saying that, the framework appears valid, and makes a lot of sense, once you start to get to grips with it. The top level describes the discursive process, the bottom level the interactive process, and the bits in the centre row address the adaptive and reflective processes. Perhaps all Laurillard is doing here is mapping out the teaching process that we already understand. Where is does get interesting is where we start to map different forms of educational media over the model to see what aspects they can actually address.

This is perhaps where criticism number 2 needs to be aired. I think Laurillard’s definition of interactive educational media is limited (Hypertext, Enhanced Hypertext and Web resources). Perhaps that’s a reflection of the time in which the book was first published:- 2002. Technology marches on a pace, and I believe that there is now more scope to analyse different web based learning resources against this model. There is no mention of wikis, blogs, online quizzes, screencasts with integrated assessment, virtual classrooms or resources that use artificial intelligence to adapt to the responses of the learner

More importantly, I have to question whether it is valid to analyse the use of any single media in isolation. Surely, even in a face to face environment, multiple educational media are employed : Talking, Listening, Visual Cues, Paralanguage, Reflection.

Perhaps the model will allow us to identify what aspects of interactivity individual learning technologies posses. From that, perhaps we can build a model to produce truly effective interactive online teaching.

Refs

Laurillard, D. 2002, Rethinking university teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies, RoutledgeFalmer, London.

Yacci, M., 1999. Interactivity Demystified: A Structural Definition for Distance Education and Intelligent CBT. , (1996), pp.1-18.

Blogging on the go

I’m sat in Costas drinking a large latte with an extra shot of espresso and caramel syrup. The only way to drink Costas coffee. I’m going for this big style and am blogging on my Android phone. I found a really good WordPress app, and thought I’d try mobile blogging. Chances are that predictive text is kicking in and that I’m blogging about “leaning yetis” rather than learning tech. Still, I can come back and edit at a later date. I’m hoping mobile tech will allow me to capture my thoughts while they are fresh. Let’s see eh?

Hello Folks

OK, so where do I start.

I’ve never blogged before. Actually, that’s a lie. I did blog once about a conference that I’d been to, but frankly, I’m not sure anybody ready it. And I suppose I use twitter which is often referred to as micro-blogging, although in all honesty, I see twitter more of text message to the world.

So why haven’t I blogged, and why am I blogging now. Pretty simple really. In the past, I haven’t blogged ‘cos

1) I always saw it as a mean of self publicity and frankly, I’m not that kind of person.

2) I never thought I had anything of importance to say.

There are a lot of people out there who blog on all sorts of interesting topics and there are a whole plethora of blogs on Learning Technologies from some very senior and well respected industry gurus. What can lil’ ‘ol me add to that mix?

So to answer your next question, the reason that I am blogging now is that I have to. I’m currently studying the 3^rd module of an MSc in Multimedia and eLearning. The module is entitled “Theory and Evaluation of eLearning”. So, you can pretty much guess what this blog is going to be about. Over the coming weeks, I will be blogging about my experiences of several different eLearning tools. I will attempt to use a panoptic approach to my evaluation of these tools, and relate them to established theory and socio-cultural contexts. Wow, that sound a bit highbrow!

To give you some context, it’s probably important to understand my background. I am technical. I started out my career as a C programmer, then moved to UNIX system administration after realising the lack of social interaction in programming pools. I then moved in a different direction and managed a data processing department for a direct marketing company. Finally, I moved into eLearning. It was a deliberate move. I always enjoyed delivering training within my various technical roles, and coming from a family of pedagogs, eLearning was a natural choice. A niche where I could use my technical skills and experience the buzz I get from educating others. Its also nice to be in an environment where I feel that in some small way, I am helping students to achieve their career and educational goals. It certainly makes a change from working hard just to make rich people richer. I am very comfortable with technology and pride myself in being able to adapt to any technology with ease. I also pride myself on my ability to be able to explain technology in terms that others can understand. Enough for a first post. Here’s a video to explain blogging. I’ll post my thoughts on WordPress next.

Blogs in Plain English