At the end of last semester most students shut their Edublog sites down as we were only required to have them for our e-Learning subject assignments. However I have decided to keep mine alive and continue posting to chart my progress through this my last semester of the Bachelor of Adult Education course. I have not done any study since the end of semester last November and have thoroughly enjoyed the summer break. Had a quiet Christmas period as I had to work through the January holiday season. At this stage I will not be able to have a break from work until the Uni two week break in April. This semester I am studying Program Design, Assessing Learning, Individual Differences and Adult Education Policy in Context and the classes run from 0930 hrs till 1900 hours each Wednesday. We are only into week 2 so am still trying to get a feel for each of the subjects. At this stage I would say Assessing Learning will be the most interesting closely followed by Program Design with the other two a distant equal last. Will keep posting as the semester progresses and may through in the occasional random thought such as this one:- Have you ever looked up at the night sky and considered that cavemen, oops!! sorry cavepersons, and all mankind, sorry personkind, since then would have also gazed up at the very same moon and stars that you are now looking at? Sort of gives a sensation of direct connectedness right back to the stoneages (and no I HAVE NOT been drinking, inhaling, snorting or injecting anything LOL)

I have now completed lesson 15, the last lesson in this level and the final lesson for this assignment. I certainly have learnt a lot about the Greek language and I am able to say a number of useable phrases. I can now look at Greek words and break them up phonetically so the course has been successful. I have certainly met my expectations for the course and overall it has been well presented and very easy to follow. The discussion forums and chat room in particular have been very valuable resources. The degree of collaboration between the students and facilitators has also been exceptional. I would recommend this course for any one wanting to learn the Greek language. This course was only the start of the journey as it was only the first half of the Elementary level, there are two intermediate and two advanced courses to follow which I am intending to follow through to.

Three hours into the course, have reached lesson 10. Although each lesson is around fifteen minutes have needed to revisit each lesson a number of times. Still no issues with the course, apart from there not being any formal quizzes included in the course. In the discussion forums some of the students have actually created review questions and these have been posted in the duscussion forums for all to use. You might call it Learner-Centred learning.

Reached halfway point – 2 hours. The lessons continue in same vein. Finding it easier to phonetically identify the greek letters. Still need to revisit each lesson several times. The discussion forums and chat room are a definite plus.

Have completed lesson three. The point of this assignment is to critique the actual course itself so I will try and keep my comments to how the course is presented and any failings or otherwise. So far the pace of the course is very good and the quality of the audio is very good. The presenters are very clear in their speech and the explanations as we move into new sections are well presented. I have found the discussion forums to be extremely helpful with a lot of additional information provided by fellow students and the course facilitators.

One novel feature is each lesson has a personal journal with which you can use to reflect on each lesson and make any comments on the lesson itself. These journals are submitted to the course facilitators for use as student feedback, very interesting.

Have completed first lesson. I have needed to visit other sites to gain additional information on pronunciation. The audio part of the lesson is quite good, however when required to repeat phrases the time given is inadequate and hence have had to make use of the pause button on the media player. Not sure how often the phrases ‘this is a book’ (Αυτο ειναι βιβλιο) or ‘this is a pencil’ (Αυτο ειναι μολυβι) would come in handy but you never know. One very good feature of this course is that you can print the lesson notes and follow along. I have used these notes to write each word phonetically, which by the way comes from the Greek word phntikos. So (Αυτο ειναι βιβλιο) becomes “Afto enay vivlio”.

Have spent the first half hour going through the introductory sections on the Greek Alphabet and Handwriting as well as how to set up my computer with Greek fonts and reset the keyboard to a Greek layout there is also two questionnaires to complete on what I value in an online learning experience and also what my attitudes are towards studying and learning. This information is then submitted for student survey purposes. I have also explored the discussion forum to get a feel for the course and read other students experiences. There are several links to other sites with audio sections on pronunciation and grammar structure. Will explore these further as required. With this background knowledge I am ready for the first lesson.

The home page for this site has a number of support and general information pages. Some of these are, News Forum; Technical Questions; Site News; Chat Room; Instructions; General Language Questions; and, a Contact Us link. There is very little advertising and what there is is very understated.

You now have a choice of courses to enrol in from Elementary through to Advanced. For my purpose I am choosing Greek 101 (Elementary) and the main page for this has quite an array of choices some of which are pasted below.

Activities Chats Activities Chats

Documents Relevant to All Lessons News forum Your Suggestions for Improvement Books for this course General Chat Room for Greek 101 Anyone from… ? Greek handwriting questions Greek alphabet questions Greek font/keyboard questions Greek music Dictionary for Lessons 1-15

In addition to these choices there is an Administration box, Lates News, Online Users and Course that you are enrolled in.

The central section has the individual lessons listed and you can move freely forwards or backwards as required. The first lesson has the most content

Lesson 001

Audio For Lesson 001

Notes For Lesson 001

The One Accent System

The Greek Alphabet 1

The Greek Alphabet 2

Greek Alphabet Handwriting

Greek Keyboard

Installing Greek Fonts on your Computer

Questionnaire 1 – what you value in an online learning experience

Questionnaire 2 – your attitudes towards studying and learning

Personal Journal For Lesson 001

Discussion Forum For Lesson 001 All the other lessons only have the Audio, Notes, Personal Journal and Discussion Forum. Now that I have established the layout of the course site I will now begin the learning process.

  The online course that I have chosen for this assignment is Learn Greek Online. The Site is sponsored by Cyprus Broadcasting Association and a site known as ΚΥΠΡΟΣ-Νet or Kypros-Net. This site is an internet information resource centre organization which has a goal to utilize the internet and particularly the World Wide Web system for the promotion of the world of Cyprus.

You are required to set up a free account through a registration process. The site does ask for donations of $1 – $20 towards helping with site development costs if you like the course and they have a facility on their site for that purpose. Once registered the courses are free and the site offers courses in Modern Greek from Elementary level through to Advanced level. It also offers a course in ancient Greek.

The site does not have stated objectives or outcomes as such but simply states that the course is provided to teach the modern Greek language.

My expectations are that after four hours I will have a much better understanding of the Greek language, both written and verbal and be able to speak some fairly simple phrases.

As far as the learning experience is concerned I hope it will be a positive one with well presented and easy to understand course content.

I am hoping there will be good support considering it is a course about learning to speak a foreign language. I would expect there will be sufficient resources to accommodate students from beginner level upwards.

Just recently I discovered a Google feature that has proved to very useful. Its called Web Alerts. The programme allows you to enter topics of interest and on a regular basis you will get a web alert e-mail as soon as anything is posted on the web regarding those topics. Over the past 2 months I have been getting daily e-mails with newly posted articles on e-learning, elearning and online learning. It has proved to be very worthwhile for this course as one of the issues we have with internet articles is they usually do not have a posted date so you do not know how recent or indeed relevant the article is. With this feature you get articles ‘hot off the press’. There are other interesting  features to be found on their Google Labs Page which are still being developed but you can try them out and evaluate them, in other words become a Google Lab rat. You will also find programmes such as Web Alert which have graduated from the Lab on this page, google Notebook is another interesting program.

Well that’s it for now, I plan to have a few weeks break away from the computer. I am planning to have a go at building my own gaming computer to while away the hours till next semester.

p.s. Roman, I hope you like this layout (5th attempt), you will also notice I have dropped the green font just for you : )

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Well, here we are, last week. Tears of joy or just tears ! For those that are finishing this week, all I can say is “You Lucky, Lucky Bas#$&ds“ Good luck for the future. Our classes next year are going to be so quiet without Steve’s constant, (some might say incessant), thought provoking, sometimes controversial  but usually entertaining contributions to the classes.

To those other mid year students, enjoy the break and see you next year. For those that might be interested I think I will keep this site going but with the shackles of keeping blogs e-learning related finally removed I will, at last, be able to post some items that might actually be interesting, (Well at least to me LOL)!!!

I had an interesting revelation recently. I am a member of the Australian Institute of Training & Development and we had a guest speaker (an exceptionally good one I must say -thanks again Anne) talking about Web 2.0. Early in the talk we were asked by show of hands who, has a blog,  uses Flickr, uses Delicious, use a wiki, subscribe to podcasts, use an aggregator, mashes-up and who can describe what RSS does (in plain English).

In a group of around 40 people I found myself one of a small number who could raise their hand for each of these questions. Then came the revelation. 10 weeks ago I would not have been able to raise my hand for one of them!!!!! I had become an e-Learner!!!!!

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I thought I should revisit an earlier post on this topic where I left my friend scratching his head about e-learning in Energy Australia. We do have a number of computer based courses that staff are required to complete. CBT programs are used for induction training, statutory type training and several other HR type packages. Our main training group are presently developing some interactive web based programs for our electrical field staff and they look quite promising. Otherwise, the majority of our internal training is competency based and still relies on the “chalk and talk” methodology.

The reading for this week  is Preparing E-Learners for Online Success by Ryan Watkins.

Watkins focusses on the demands placed on new e-learners with regard to study skills. He discusses some of the differences between traditional teaching and e-learning particularly the absence of the instructor when the learner may be struggling with a problem. He mentions that the learner needs to become more reliant on peer support.

We are told that the learner needs to be able to adapt existing study skills and habits learned from traditional study and develop and apply new e-learning study skills and habits.

He suggests that e-learners conduct a self-assessment survey to identify their strengths and weaknesses with regards to e-learning study skills. However he counters that suggestion with a comment that perhaps most potential e-learners would have limited exposure to the technology and study skills required for e-learning and hence would have difficulty carrying out a self-assessment on their capabilities.

The reading finishes with six tips that instructors might use to assist new e-learners. These are : 1) Include online activities as ice-breakers for learners. 2) Become familiar with the technologies used in current e-learning courses as well as other technologies that e-learners may ask about during the course. 3) Provide e-learners with the necessary information for getting in touch with technical support. 4) Offer learners opportunities to assess and improve their technology skills and e-learning study skills. 5) Supply learners with links that can prepare them with the specific skills for accomplishing the learning objectives. 6) Encourage learners to interact and communicate with other learners.

Reference

Watkins, R. 2005, Preparing e-learners for Online Success, Learning Circuits, ASTD, Virginia

http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/sep2005/watkins.htm

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I thought it would be worthwhile to reflect on our e-Learning Experience class. What a steep learning curve it has been, it really has been an e-Learning experience. I have learnt so much over these weeks. The social bookmarking is fantastic and I have introduced it to fellow workers. One of the admin girls is in a Quilting club and she has set up a site for her fellow club members to share. Netvibes is such a versatile program with seemingly endless possibilites and then there is the wiki which we haven’t had much to do with so far. 

As I mentioned in a previous blog, When I commenced this class I knew nothing about all this stuff and now I am boring people senseless talking about it. I am sure its not just my imagination but I’m certain I hear the word ‘geek’ as they run away from me!! Oh well back to my e-Zine…

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The lesson began with a discussion on the reading as summarised in the previous post. Particularly on the section relating to dealing with problematic students. Genearally the class felt that with face-to-face learning environments you were able to pick up on students body language and perhaps head off any problems before they become major problems whereas with online teaching the problem could readily get out of hand. Particularly with 24/7 internet activity between students.

One of the unanswered questions was with online learning how much time should the teacher put in and when should he/she be avaliable to respond to students who may be online at any time?

The remainder of the lesson was spent preparing for the last assignment which is to participate in a short online course and critique it.

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The reading for Week 9 was from Palloff & Pratt, 2001 Lessons From Cyberspace  chapter 7 ‘Working with the Virtual Student’.

One of the key points in this article related to the need for the learner to be aware of, and prepared for, the differences between traditional learning and online learning. One case is mentioned where the learning organisation actually ran a course to teach the learners how to learn online.

The often repeated comment is how the learner must take responsibility for their own learning and that online training relies heavily on collaboration between the learners and less reliance on the teacher. As a matter of fact the teacher is more a facilitator and guide. The article also notes that not all learners are suited to online learning and that research has found the most successful learners are self-disciplined, self-motivated, generally older and have voluntarily sought further education.

The article finishes with a number of tips for successfully working with Virtual Students. These are: 1) Do not assume students will automatically know how to learn online. 2) Provide some form of orientation to students as they embark on an online experience. 3) Construct a course that is varied and addresses different learning styles. 4) Encourage and empower students to take charge of the learning process. 5) Pay attention to changes in participation levels and address them promptly. 6) Stay present and be responsive to students needs and concerns.

Reference

Palloff, Rena & Pratt, Keith, 2001, Working with the Virtual Student in Lessons from Cyberspace, Jossey-Bass.

http://drr.lib.uts.edu.au/file/17282/013966_palloffworking.pdf

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Where do people get the time for all this internet chatting etc. I have only just checked out TWITTER. Referred to as MICRO-BLOGGING . I have enough trouble getting time to do more than one blog a week for uni. What’s going on??? Is anyone actually doing any work out there?

Twittering is confined to 140 characters but hooks up with e-mails, sms as well as instant messaging and when you check out some of the twitters it’s obvious there are a lot of people with nothing else to with their time.

Check out this example quoted from the Wall Street Journal:

9:51 a.m. Tweet Tweet… Just checking in… Happy Friday Twitter-ers

11:02 a.m. Getting ready for my 1sy Yoga class of the year! I’m scared.

2:02 p.m. Late Lunch – Tomato Soup & Pretzel. 4hrs till Happy Hour! (Yoga was good)

4:11 p.m. Falling asleep at my desk. 2 more hours till cocktails!

5:40 p.m. Shutting down & Heading to the Bar. Might turn on twitter-txt (you’ll hate it I’m sure)

5:43 p.m. Just for DougH, I will Twitter-intoication

8:01 p.m. Hi twitts miss ya etc.

Really exciting eh?

Visit the site below to read the article titled “Friends Swap Twitters and Frustration”

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117373145818634482-ZwdoPQ0PqPrcFMDHDZLz_P6osnI_20080315.html 

In this article Kevin Kruse offers a well balanced look at this subject. He opens by warning that “…it is important to know exactly what e-learning advantages exist and when these outweigh the limitations of the medium.” 

His first section looks at the features that are unique to e-learning with some of the key points being that e-learning “…accommodates the three distinct learning styles of auditory learners, visual learners, and kinesthetic learners.” It also offered reduced publishing and distribution costs and can target a globally dispersed audience.

The article then goes on to provide an evenly balanced list of the advantages and disadvantages of e-learning to the Trainer, Organization, and Learner.

The article concludes by asking the question “Do the Benefits Outweigh the Drawbacks?” and the response given is “The pro’s and con’s of e-learning vary depending on program goals, target audience and organizational infrastructure and culture.” This is a refreshing view amongst some of the hype surrounding this subject.

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.

It is interesting to note that quite a few fellow students are not very computer lit. I am not all that up on the latest technology but have managed to get this site set up and running but many others struggling. I was surprised to hear someone admit that they did not have a computer at home, I found this quite surprising. Its amazing how you take some things for granted.

Hi everyone, this is my first post. Just to check that it is working. back soon….