An interesting article posted in the Guardian Unlimited -  

Guardian Unlimited – “Students Tell Universities” Get Out of MySpace” - reveals how students are not happy about lecturers accessing their social networking sites for academic purposes!!

The article is based on research that found that students want to keep their social lives separate from their university lives and did not want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information.

Their message to trendy academics was loud and clear “GET OUT OF MySpace!!!!”

On the other hand the article did go on to discuss the need for universities to stay in touch with this technology and when used responsibly can provide valuable support to both students and lecturers as well as ultimately creating a virtual campus for distance learning students.

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The lesson commenced with a discussion of the reading for the week. The discussion was very interesting with many students entering into the discussion presenting their views on Watkins’ comments. Generally the class agreed with his views, especially with the statement that not all learners are suited to e-learning. The ‘Readiness Surveys’ created some healthy debate with some comments that the quoted questions were not relevant to todays’ students whilst other comments felt that the questions used were relevant for the target audience who were US Coastguard staff.

Assessment Task 3 was then discussed looking at the needs of this assessment task. It was noted that Activity 3.3 needs to be completed prior to commencing the online course. This allows each student to state what are the stated course objectives and outcomes and what were their expectations of the course. This information will be relevant when the reflection of the course is carried out.  

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Just when we seemed to be getting on top of e-learning more and more articles are making reference to m-learning!!! 

So what is m-learning? Well, as the name implies it has to do with an ‘m’ word and that word is ‘mobile’. There are a number of sites which provide background information on m-learning and some of these sites are listed at the end of this blog. Whilst we could readily make the assumption that the mobile in m(obile)-learning refers to mobile phones there are other mobile devices that are included in this category. These are mp3 players and PDAs. The technology of these devices is quickly approaching that of a computer. My own mp3 player (Creative: Zen Vision M) has 60 Gigabytes of memory and plays videos as well as audio and slideshows. My 4 year old home pc by comparison has only 80 Gigabytes of memory!!

My PDA has Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer, e-mail, Windows Media Player as well as Bluetooth and WiFi capability. As far as mobile phones are concerned one only has to peruse the seemingly endless stream of advertising for mobile phones to note their growth as a truly multi-function communication device. Rajesh Rastogi in his article Aspects of M-Learning states that the “kind of infitration that mobile phones have reached is astonishing, no other device can come closer, not even computers. Mobiles have a global reach not only in developed countries but also in the third world, they can be found in every village.” (Rastogi, R. 2007) 

The following sites provide more detail on this phenomenom with examples of how m-learning is being used:

http://www.m-learning.org/index.htm

http://www.palm.com/us/education/studies/

http://www.k12handhelds.com/101list.php

This site is particularly good http://www.pjb.co.uk/m-learning/articles.htm

Reference

Rastogi, R. 2007, Aspects of M-Learning, PR_GB.com…News from origin, viewed 6 Ocober 2007, http://pr-gb.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26791&Itemid=9

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Since the beginning of this semester I have read a lot of articles and books on e-learning. One of the observations made along the way is the internalising going on amongst the e-learning advocates as to what e-learning is and what it can do. I believe that this has not been helpful in establishing e-learning amongst the more traditional learning community. After all if the e-learning community can’t agree on these points then who can?

Another observation is that the “Get Rich Quick”  brigade have had a profound and possibly lasting damaging impact on the reputation of e-learning.

And finally, the lack of management understanding of the importance of needs assessments and program evaluations has also had disasterous consequences.

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I recently stumbled upon a fantastic case study on e-learning involving a Scottish company, Glenmorangie, who produce whisky. The case study - Glenmorangie takes shot at e-learning - revealed that the company wanted to improve the employees’ IT and business skills but due to staff being spread over a number of remote distilleries they decided to make use of the companies intranet and introduce e-learning.

The other problem was that the company had a large number of shift workers so with a show of progressive thinking the company decuded to have their learning centre open 24 hours a day.

The company also received government support as part of its learndirect flexible learning initiative. The employees were very enthisatic in their response and the company has seen high usage of the courses.

Due to this response and government support the company has extended the learning centre usage to workers’ families and friends and will soon be opening up to local organisations and schools.

A wonderful story.

Glenmorangie takes shot at e-learning

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One of my procrastination tools whilst doing uni assignments is to follow links on sites I have accessed and I am often amazed at where I end up. Usually in all sort of unrelated areas and so it was whilst following one of these unrelated links I came across mention of Professor Randy Pausch and his “Last Lecture”.

A number of  universities in America conduct “Last Lecture Series,” in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. The Carnegie Mellon University had one of their top professors Randy Pausch who teaches in the Virtual Reality field to give a talk. In Randy Pausch’s case it is indeed his last lecture.

At 47 he is about to die from Pancreatic cancer. The theme of his lecture was about chasing his childhood dreams, things he has learnt along the way and lessons he would like to pass on to his students but most of all to his three children all under 5 years of age.

The lecture was recorded and is linked here (after it starts, if you ‘right click’ in the video you can choose full screen size) - Prof. Randy Pausch’s Last lecture - It runs for 2 hours but once I started watching it I was glued to the screen. I defy anyone to watch this and not have to reach for the tissues. Professor Pausch is a truly inspirational person and he is what I imagined all university professors would be like.

The Wall Street Journal called the lecture “the lecture of a lifetime” and those who have seen it have more than agreed just do a search on Randy Pausch and see for yourself.

During his talk Randy refers to running into obstacles along life’s journey especially when trying to achieve something. He refers to these obstacles as ‘brick walls’ and his attitude to these were,  “Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls aren’t there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show us how badly we want things.”. He followed on to say that if you did  want that thing bad enough you would find ways to get around that brick wall, that if you let the brick wall stop you then perhaps it wasn’t so important after all.

There are also included in this talk many examples of great teaching strategies. I particularly liked his reference to ‘head fakes’. You will have to watch it to see what I am refering to.

I can heartily recommend that you spend the time to watch this video and would be interested in your comments.

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One of the speakers at a conference I recently attended was Kim Kemeny, the Learning and Development Manager from an  Australian company – Codan Limited – whose main Australian base is in Adelaide. Kim’s talk, titled Simple & Effective e-learning in action – An industry example, was about how the company identified a need to respond to a number of business drivers including industry skills shortage, expanding workforce requiring training on-demand, continuous re-skilling and up-skilling of their employees due to constantly changing technology. This led to identifying a need to review their training methods to better utilise their resources and improve efficiency.

One option from this review was to introduce an online training package. This presented a considerable challenge to their training resources as they only had 3 trainers. Also, up till this time all training was carried out using traditional training methods so they had to start from scratch. After reviewing 25 training packages they decided to go alone and develop their own package. One of the factors was that with all packages reviewed they would need to keep going back to the vendor each time they wanted to modify the course content, hence ongoing costs.

Codan were fortunate to secure financial assistance for their project through the Australian Flexible Learning Framework organisation. Another major decision was to collaborate with peer groups, industry associations as well as TAFE and UNSA.

The process they followed was to identify the needs of the package as well as the platform requirements. This led them to an e-learning development program – Showcase - which they used to develop their course. Part of the process was to identify e-learning challenges and some of these were cost, resistance to e-learning from older staff and computer phobia. One of the methods used with regard to the older staff was to include them right from the beginning of the development process to give them ownership.

A significant partner in the whole process was the Australian Flexible Learning Framework . As the name states this organisation is committed to the flexible learning philosophy especially e-learning.  

The final training package was produced at a cost below $5000 and the actual training takes a blended approach. The response from the employees was very positive and the company has gone on to produce another four courses.

 The talk was very inspiring and demonstrated that anyone can take that step from just thinking about e-learning to actually doing it.

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I have often wondered what drives a person to want to have their own webpage on sites such as MySpace, Facebook etc and to bare their souls for all the world to see. My theory is that there are three categories of individuals that have their own page.

1. Egotists who love to see their photos and personal info ‘on the web’.

2. Opinionated persons who now have a worlwide forum to impose their views.

and 3. Persons with poor social skills who have problems talking to people face to face.

And then there are the blogging sites such as this. I am doing this because it is an assignment for uni. We are required to establish our own pages and then post on a weekly basis until the end of the semester. This is my first experience at this so not sure where it will lead to and which of the above categories I will end up falling into, perhaps all three!!! 

Have been reflecting on the application of e-learning in a trade-based training environment. I am not sure how much competency type training can be converted to an e-learning context. Probably some of the theory content could be presented electronically, perhaps even demonstrations via video hookup might work. Most of the TAFE teachers seem to be struggling to grasp the whole e-learning thing.