Musings about life in retirement from academe
E-Learning Queen writes about the Podcast Theory Gap: Online learners seem to prefer using audio and web-based information in ways that counter what researchers recommend. Although instructional designers do not often like to mention this, the fact is, it is the rare learner who will sit at a computer and willingly watch a 20 or 30-minute presentation. However, the same...
Scott Sorley speculates about the potential for what he dubs Google-matic Courseware – Real Time Content: I have been busy over the last week testing ideas by writing code not prose. The question here is what do you do if you have an entire library, academic journals, every webpage, every blog, all major news sources in a digital, up to...
“m” (for mobile) has been appended to “learning” in various contexts over the past year or so. It has been a little “out there” but recently several factors have come together to attract my more active interest. My son, Nick, has been working on a Java application that will run on a mobile phone. It seems there are a lot...
One of the quirks of publishing course materials through the official channels of DeC (Distance and e-Learning Centre) at USQ has been that materials are revised each year and, whether the changes are major or minor, the publication date appears as the year in which the course is offered. In other words, it is not possible to know from the...
Chris Lott at Ruminate writes about a Singapore presentation by John Seely Brown: Brown recalls key points about rapid change in computing, communication, storage and content; P2P and social software; and the interaction of economic, institutional and technological change. His common sense model has 5 components: Supply push is becoming demand pull. For education this implies a shift from building...
READ MORE Ubiquitous computing and beyond – an emerging new common sense model
This post is something of a departure from my usual quick notes about other sites. It’s a very minor revision of my mandated report to the Faculty on conference travel. I spent the week from 26 Feb to 7 Mar traveling and attending SITE 2005 – the 16th Annual Meeting of the Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education in...
George Siemens writing in the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning concludes: A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known knowledge at the point of application. When knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve,...
READ MORE Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age
James Farmer at incorporated subversion picks up on Scott Wilson’s piece on the future of the VLE and writes: Take, for example, a typical tertiary student. In any one semester they may well be enrolled in four units each with an online presence each lasting effectively 13-14 weeks… now if each unit has a community and you ask that student...
READ MORE Un-Managing Learning Management Systems – A possible future for online learning
Peter Sefton comments on some of the material I have been reading lately: I think that one of the pressures on current LMSs will be from the aggregator. An aggregator is a leveling technology that can pull all the stuff in which you are interested into a common interface; sort of a do it yourself ‘portal’ without the stupid little...
READ MORE Aggregation will be rough on Learning Management Systems
I don’t often figure in the media, local or otherwise, so last week was unusual in that respect. I managed to participate in a brief interview on the local ABC breakfast show and to be quoted in the weekend edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. About 2 weeks ago Gus Snow-McLean, USQ PR manager, emailed to say that an SMH...