Monday, November 24, 2008
Friday, November 07, 2008
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Monday, October 06, 2008
Moodle Moot AU 2008
Some thoughts on the recent Moodle conference in Brisbane, Australia. Audio (7 mins 37 secs) provided from Utterli, and images from the conference provided by Slideflickr
Friday, October 03, 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
Slidecast - Voice Tools for Language and Literacy
I have just managed to synch the audio with the slides from a recent presentation on Online Voice Tools for Language and Literacy. The original session was held in Skype. I recorded both sides of the conversation (me and online participants) and uploaded the audio to the Internet archive.
I uploaded the slides into Slideshare and used their synching audio and slides tool to create a slidecast. I'm really happy with the result and now I know how to do this I'll be doing it again. Here is the final product.
(It's 45 minutes long.)
The Internet archive also provides the embedding code so you can listen to the audio only right here:
I uploaded the slides into Slideshare and used their synching audio and slides tool to create a slidecast. I'm really happy with the result and now I know how to do this I'll be doing it again. Here is the final product.
(It's 45 minutes long.)
The Internet archive also provides the embedding code so you can listen to the audio only right here:
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Good Will Bonking :)
The following are a few notes from the recent interview that Will Richardson conducted with Curtis Bonk. It’s about an hour long and the audio is a bit of a struggle initially but it does improve in the second half.
Curt has just released a new book called Empowering online learning The interview touches on issues raised in the book but is not about the book.
CB: George Siemens' Theory of Connectivism is more a description of what’s happening rather than a theory.
WR: How does knowledge construction change in online communities?
CB: Learning is more informal than formal. People share stories
WR/CB: Books like Seymour Papert’s Mind-Storms (published 1993) feel like they were written today! It has taken this long for ideas of people like Papert to gain respectability and currency. Technology has made possible theories that have been around a long time.
WR: How do we unlearn traditional assessment approaches?
CB: Peer/extended network assessment. But there is still a place for traditional teacher-centred approaches
Reference: Darren Draper – have you been paying attention?
There was some discussion of new models of publishing. Curt himself is trying to decide how to publish his new book. Options include:
* Wiki + html (web) pages + book
* Pdf + comments facility
* Hypothetical: Blog daily for a year and compile into a book
Question left unanswered: will mainstream publishers accept these models? (Curt is conscious of the fact that he will be seen as a hypocrite if his next book is not an ‘open book.’, and is investigating new models with different publishers.)
Other Publishing Models:
Flat World Knowledge
Scribd - a ‘YouTube for text.’ (CB)
Other Titbits
Jay Cross and his work on Informal Learning has been pivotal in the move towards understanding new models of education.
* Manila is the chat capital of the world (SMS)
* Wikipedia is built in to mobile devices (Africa)
* You don’t need Internet access to benefit from the Internet (phones, download to CD, etc)
* “Googlization of knowledge” (CB)
* Students in Michigan have to take an online course to graduate.
Learning Object Repositories (LORs)
Curt not convinced of their usefulness. Prefers sites with peer reviewed resources like Merlot.
Second Life/Virtual Worlds
Curt thinks they’re too hard for a lot of people and is watching Google’s Lively
Online Language Learning
CB: Is exploding across the Internet; arrangements where learners of Chinese are matched up with teachers of Chinese who want to learn English and swap services are becoming more common; predicts even further growth
WR: Where will be 20 years from now?
* Jack Cummings, Indiana Uni Dean, dropped in briefly and said that now Harvard had joined those institutions adopting an open content policy others will follow suit. (There are 57 mirror sites of MIT’s open courseware initiative in sub-Saharan Africa.)
* As networks of personalized learning become more widespread there will be 24/7 access to subject mentors around the world, who won’t be aligned to a single institution.
* Cell phones will become more to central to provision of educational content.
* The move to synchronous education approaches will increase
* More and more visualization tools – of thought, networks. (MC: some of these already exist.)
(image at top courtesy of Oliver Ding's Freesouls slide show)
Saturday, August 02, 2008
The Anthropology of YouTube
Michael Wesch at the Library of Congress. Brilliant. Inspiring. Insightful. Important.
"Media mediates human relationships."
"loss of community"
"networked individualism" > "cultural tension"
"context collapse"
Cognition and recognition. (McLuhan)
"We live lives constantly against the law in an age of prohibition." (Lessig)
55 minutes. Find the time and watch it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU
"Media mediates human relationships."
"loss of community"
"networked individualism" > "cultural tension"
"context collapse"
Cognition and recognition. (McLuhan)
"We live lives constantly against the law in an age of prohibition." (Lessig)
55 minutes. Find the time and watch it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Sunday, June 15, 2008
What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains?
Picked this up from Will Richardson’s blog. This article from Nicholas Carr needs to be read and contemplated by all Internet educators.
I know exactly what Nicholas Carr means. More and more I find myself engaged in what I call horizontal learning (skimming multiple resources, multitasking), and have to force myself to engage in vertical learning (prolonged focus on a single topic or resource.) There is indeed a change afoot.
Implications? Identify, make explicit, and teach both approaches. See slides 13- 16 of this presentation for more on horizontal v vertical learning.
Addendum to this post
On a related note I just came across this article today - Society Hard-wired for a fall. More on what computer use may be doing to our brains.
I know exactly what Nicholas Carr means. More and more I find myself engaged in what I call horizontal learning (skimming multiple resources, multitasking), and have to force myself to engage in vertical learning (prolonged focus on a single topic or resource.) There is indeed a change afoot.
Implications? Identify, make explicit, and teach both approaches. See slides 13- 16 of this presentation for more on horizontal v vertical learning.
Addendum to this post
On a related note I just came across this article today - Society Hard-wired for a fall. More on what computer use may be doing to our brains.
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