Group items tagged

A case study of an international online community. Nancy Graham & Jane Secker. [Higher Education Academy]

Online discussion prompts often do little prompting; they fail to engage the student in meaningful dialogue. Rather, the conversation that often surfaces is one centered around tasks, deadlines, or assignment instructions, rather than a dialogue about motivation, procrastination, or the complexities of technology.

A group of European leaders in TEL, led by Nicolas Balacheff, is putting together an open access Thesaurus and Dictionary of TEL, in multiple languages, as a service to the community. Nicolas is looking for further entries to be written on e.g.: Pervasive Learning, Augmented Reality Learning, Handheld Learning, Blended Learning and would be happy to have offers of further topics that are not in the list. A Thesaurus entry is short (one page) in a structured format, and you will be credited as editor of that entry.

"What is digital literacy and how is it different from information literacy? Digital literacy includes the ability to find and use information (otherwise known as information literacy) but goes beyond this to encompass communication, collaboration and teamwork, social awareness in the digital environment, understanding of e-safety and creation of new information. Both digital and information literacy are underpinned by critical thinking and evaluation."

"This project addresses the long-standing gap between the rhetoric and the realities of TEL. For example, it examines the disparities between the educational potential of technology in comparison to what takes place in practice. This is a tension that recurs throughout much of the research and practitioner literature on technology use within higher education. On one hand, there is evidence for the potential of digital technology to support and sustain meaningful and effective forms of learning. Networked digital technologies have undoubtedly transformed the generation and communication of knowledge and, it follows, that this has influenced the ways in which learning takes place. The potential to 'support', 'enable', or even 'enhance' learning has therefore been associated with every significant development in digital technology over the past twenty years or so."