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UK was a Trip |
| Sunday, January 15, 2006 |
Ok, back from a week in the UK. Yesterday, I experienced a bomb scare in the express train terminal heading to Gatwick airport and they made us all exit the station...and then when I got to Gatwick the computers were down and the place was a zoo. Last week when flying to Gatwick, our plane had multiple engine and power system problems and we sat on the runway for 3 hours while our plane engine got a new starter. Suffice to say, it was a strange trip and I am happy to be safely home.
When in the UK, I presented on learning style and motivational ideas online at London South Bank University. It was an all day seminar with people from Australia and the UK presenting before and after me. Rick Bennett was among them and he presented on his art and design project online. The people at London South Bank were not heavy users of e-learning but it was definitely growing. There was a wonderful view of the London Eye from the lunch meeting room.
Rick and I also spent 2 days at the University of Leicester where Dr. Gilly Salmon was running an e-learning conference. About 60-70 people came for the first day which was focused on e-learning research. I gave the keynote with 10 stories for 10+ years of e-learning research at IU. When someone picked a story they got a CD of my work and an "I love New York" t-shirt. Day 2 was on potential partnerships. It seems the University of Leicester wants to be known for e-learning research. The hiring of Gilly Salmon from the Open University is a start. She is now hiring many people to support her and her multmedia zoo. Faculty and staff from all over the UK and beyond can for this event. Many potential e-learning partnerships were formed on Day 2 related to emerging technologies, online moderation, Wikis and blogs, online professional development, etc. I think the hope is for some jointly written research. More such partnerships are possible in the UK than in the USA since people can just jump in a train and meet up.
The following day, I had a chance to speak both at Oxford Brookes University and the University of Oxford. The Oxford Brookes presentations on blended learning and on how the learning world have become flat were well attended with about 50 or so people. Many good questions asked. The University of Oxford talk on blended learning was fun to do as well. Very bright students there, of course. I just got there in time as I had to wait 45 minutes for a taxi and the taxi driver I had was in training. Dr. Chris Davies from Oxford would like to put it on the e-learning map. They have a new master's in e-learning there in fact. I may spend a week of my sabbatical there. Would be an exciting week to do so.
Took the train back to London that night and met my old friend, Bob Craig, who had took me around New Zealand and also the United Arab Emirates in the past. this was our 3rd country to meet in. He is now working in Africa in Ethiopia and Somalia on educational programs.
So, lots seems to be happening in the UK in e-learning. Some of the focus is on research and also on digital repositories, blended learning, problem-based learning online, staff and instructor training, and retention and motivation online. The UK is a hotbed for e-learning in terms of my travel during the past year and Canada is the other. |
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E-Learning Predictions for 2006 |
| Friday, December 30, 2005 |
Lisa Neal from E-Learn Magazine http://www.elearnmag.org/ asked for my e-learning predictions for the coming year and then posts them to the online magazine site. She gets people like Elliott Masie, Carol Twigg, Margaret Driscoll, Metty Collis, Jennifer Hoffman, Stephen Downes, Clark Aldrich, Josh Bersin, Allison Rossett, Jonathan Levy, Saul Carliner, Mark Oehlert, Cathie Norris, Kinshuk, etc. to post their views. She even posts her own views. You will notice that many of these people are from the corporate training sector though a view are from higher education. Of course, Stephen Downes will always be interesting to read.
Well, Lisa has asked for my opinions again. I listed mine below.
"As instructors and trainers continue to become aware of the power and ease of creation of things such as wikibooks, blogs, Webcasts, and podcasts, 2006 will spur an explosion of media-rich and creative instructional approaches. Audio and video will become more expected in e-learning. For instance, instructors will increasingly add audio books to student reading (i.e., listening) lists. At the same time, knowledge repositories and mobile e-learning will lead to a rise in personally selected learning experiences and even self-labeled degrees. Entire certificate and degree programs will be available from content in handheld devices such as an iPod or MP3 player. This will lead a boom in professional development and training opportunities."
I am curious what you all think about e-learning and blended learning in 2005. It will undoubtedly be another interesting year! I will make one more prediction--with my sabbatical from May 1, 2006 to September 1, 2007, I will visit some great new places and enjoy the year. |
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The So Sad and Silly State of the CMS |
| Sunday, December 18, 2005 |
What do you think of the course management systems (CMSs) that are out there today? Have we seen much improvement in the past decade in terms of teaching and learning functionality? If so where?
Someone recently noted to me that CMS developers (e.g., Sakai, Blackboard, and other ones as well) were not thinking how the tool will be used “in the classroom to support TEACHING;” particularly when group learning and virtual teaming is involved. What do you think? Personally, I loved this person’s capitalization of the word "teaching" and I will add "LEARNING" to it.
In fact, when I do talks around the planet on this stuff I point out that the only thing that course management systems have done in terms of helping with teaching and learning during the past decade (in terms of what is new and did not exist prior to the development of a CMS or the emergence of the Web as a teaching and learning platform) is design spaces for collaboration and group workspaces and even those existed prior to the Web. Now that may sound harsh, but the truth of the matter is that discussion and chats existed before the emergence of the Web so such tools are nothing new and to be honest a review of collaboration tools I did for the web back in 1990 and 1991 uncovered dozens of collab tools at various levels of interaction and that was years prior to the emergence of CMSs. In defense of CMS developers, more tools are expected of one system now (e.g., online gradebooks, chats, profiles, discussion, etc.) and it simply takes a while to code. It is sorta unfair to expect them to be developed quickly in one tool.
Here in the School of Education at IU, our 100+ faculty members were extremely happy with a tool called SiteScape Forum (SSF) and that was taken away from us this year in the move to Sakai (but we are willing to cope and push ahead despite the superior functionality of SSF from a teaching and learning standpoint). CMSs like Oncourse, Angel, Desire2Learn, Sakai, WebCT, and Blackboard all lack teaching and learning tools--they are administrative tools (tools to see how many people are logged in and when), they are management of student tools (ala behaviorism--they "manage" things--they should instead be freeing students up to learn), and they are tools designed by technology people for the most part, but they are not, in their present state teaching and learning tools. None of them. And the recent merger of WebCT and Blackboard will not improve anything when you have 2 primitive tools, from a teaching and learning standpoint, merging.
I knew that it is still somewhat in beta state, but I am using Sakai this semester in a fully online class and I have had to give up a number of innovative teaching things I did a year ago in the exact same course using SSF. I have had to totally revamp a blogging activity to use Blogger and LiveJournal instead of Sakai since scrolling through 50 posts per blog and having 20 blogs in Sakai (i.e., 20 students are in the class) would have been 1,000 posts to weed through each time--ug! The online forum is simply harder to use and much much slower than SSF and much slower than the old Oncourse (Note: Oncourse is the name of the IU tool) and I never liked the old Oncourse much either. The new Oncourse/Sakai takes forever to see who posted and join in conversations and my eyes go buggy with the online discussion forums. But I still support the movement to Sakai and I decided to use what works for now. In the long run it is the right solution. We often take 2 steps back in order to take a step forward and this is likely the case. IU needs to be a leader right now in this space and model use of Sakai and so we are.
That being said, the rare improvement in learning that I have seen in most CMSs is in group workspaces and collaboration. While we are at it, we also need tools for brainstorming, timelining, comparison and contrast, concept mapping (ala Tufts Visual Understanding Environment), role play, debate, Venn diagramming, etc.
Just my 3 cents. |
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