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)

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.

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)!!!

In her excellent report, ‘E-learning 101′, Janet Clarey provides a very much needed resource for newcomers to the world of e-learning. The language used and the layout of this document makes it very easy to read and understand and includes a 16 page glossary.

By way of introduction Janet provides a brief history of e-learning and in that introduction we are told “Although e-learning has only been around since the 1960s, distance learning – which e-learning can be categorised as – has evolved over the past 100-150 years when study was offered via ‘post’.” (Clarey 2007, p.9)

This statement caused me to reflect on my own experiences and it got me thinking of life before computers, dvds, compact discs, videos and even television. (Yes I am that old !!!!!!). I am not the sort of person who can readily recall my very early years however whilst reflecting a random memory turned up.

I was lying in the lounge room as a preschooler (mid 1950s) listening to a radio program which consisted of New Australian women (that was the terminology in those days ‘Ethnic’ and ‘Multicultural’ were yet to be invented)  engaging in normal day to day conversations. I think they were run along the lines of modern day soap operas.

I believe the program was called ‘English for New Australians’ and it was aimed at the predominately Italian and Greek housewives to help them learn to speak English. I have contacted the ABC archives section to get more information but so far no replies. The Australian Sound and Film Archive centre does have a listing for one episode of this program which went to air on the 7th July 1951.

 My next memory of “e-learning” would have been in the late fifties early sixties in primary school. We used to have ABC songbooks and at certain times the radio would be brought into the classroom and across Australia thousands of schoolchildren would be ’singing’ their heads off learning great Australian songs.

Television has obviously played a major role in preschoolers education. I wonder how many kids learned to count from The Count from Sesame Street.

Another form of early e-learning was provided by records. Some years ago I was given a collection of ‘Learn to Speak French’ 78rpm records which date from the late 1940s.

So it can be seen that e-Learning has been part of the evolutionary process of ‘distance learning’. And as e-learning is evolving it is branching out into what may be termed the ‘traditional’ learning world. 

It is importat that as teachers/instructors we need to be part of this evolutionary process and wherever possible we should be seen as leaders, not followers.

References

Clarey, J. 2007, E-Learning 101: An Introduction to E-Learning, Learning Tools and Technologies, Brendon Hall Research, New York

I have noticed over recent weeks that we have a number of i-learnists in our midst. These people have identified themselves by their fairly negative comments about the use of e-Learning. So I thought it would be worth looking at the differences between e-Learnists and i-Learnists

Perhaps I should clarify what an i-Learnist is. We all know about e-Learning but i-Learning is all about (i)nstructor-based training. Hence i-Learnists follow the traditional ‘chalk & talk’ learning philosophy.

The Fundamentalist i-Learnists do not use any form of electronic training resources. They strictly adhere to the black/whitebaord, flip charts and hand written or typewritten notes.

The Reformist i-Learnists have made small concessions to the electronic world in that they use overhead projectors (with hand drawn slides) and have a video player to show their 1970s and 1980s training videos..

On the other hand the Fundamentalist e-Learnists see a classroom filled with computers. Classrooms with individual booths where each student has a computer with multiple monitors so they can be sending e-mails, joining chat rooms, blogging, checking out Myspace and Facebook and visiting Netvibes for the latest RSS feeds. The students communicate using e-mails, blogs, chat as well as sms to their fellow students in the booths next to them.

The Reformist e-Learnist has conceded that there is a need for personal contact so has added webcams and headsets so the students can see who they are talking to.

Somewhere in between are the Progressives. These see a world where both philosophies are embraced and the good points of each one are used as required.

So where do you stand??

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 

I have found the whole social bookmarking thing to be one of the better things to do on the internet. Since being introduced to it this semester through the del.icio.us site I have found so much potential for it. If you visit my site – del.icio.us/mikeringo.com – you will get see how far ranging this concept can be and I am still exploring the possibilities. My work groupin Energy Australia is the Operating Standards & Accreditation group (OS&A) and we deal with other supply authorities across Australia as well as needing to be aware of current government Acts, Regulations, Codes of Practice and so on so you will see a bundle called OSnA with tags of sites that relate to my group.

You wil also see a bundle under the tag of UNISTUFF. Note that I have a tag for Research.Inquiry. This is one use of this site that we should have known about in our very first semester. Each one of us since beginning uni would have visited hundreds of useful sites. If we knew about this program we could have set up our own database of useful sites specifically for this course with separate tags for each subject.

I intend to add tags for Educational Management as well as Effective Program Delivery. If anyone already has sites bookmarked for these subjects we should use our del.icio.us site to share those resources.

I have already set up another Edublog site called BEdinAdEd and will progressively add sites for all subjects of this course. If you visit it now- del.icio.us/BEdinAdEd-  you will see that it is in it’s infancy. I have started by adding sites to help in writing essays, punctuation, referencing and some sites on Bloom and Maslow. In the end I intendto have bundles for each semester with the subjects for that semester.

I hope I can set up a generic password so everyone can login and add sites to it. Just imagine if we had access to something like that right from day one.

I would like to hear what you think about that,

see you in class

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 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.