Group items tagged

There are growing expectations among college students to be able to access and manage their course materials over the World Wide Web. In its early days, faculty would create web pages by hand for posting this information. As Internet technologies and access have matured over the past decade, course and learning management systems such as Blackboard and Web CT have become the norm for distributing such materials. In today's Web 2.0 world, wikis have emerged as a tool that may complement or replace the use of traditional course management systems as a tool for disseminating course information. Because of a wiki's collaborative nature, its use also allows students to participate in the process of course management, information sharing, and content creation. Using examples from an information technology classroom, this paper describes several ways to structure and use a wiki as a course management tool, and shares results of a student survey on the effectiveness of such an approach on student learning. Keywords: Wiki, Course Management, Collaboration, Web 2.0, Content Creation, Student Learning.

The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management aims to publish perspectives on topics relevant to the study, implementation and management of knowledge management. The journal contributes to the development of both theory and practice in the field of knowledge management. The journal accepts academically robust papers, topical articles and case studies that contribute to the area of research in, and practice of knowledge management.

"The National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology (Learning and Collaborative Group) has started a research and development project exploring the Personal Learning Environment. The project researches how new technologies can be used in a personalized informal learning environment and focuses on two dimensions. The first dimension is the pedagogical: given the new affordances offered by web technologies, how can access to a wide variety of learning opportunities best be managed in an online environment? The second dimension is technical. Given a set of desired types of connections, what technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services? Existing learning management technology (such as the Learning Management System) is centered on the institution that owns and operates it as enterprise software. With the increase of lifelong and student-centered learning, individuals are more frequently enrolling in learning opportunities from multiple institutions and have a need to manage their learning through an entire career. Thus there is a need for a type of application that is centered on the learner and would constitute the person's personal learning record, portfolio, business and educational contacts, communications and creativity tools, library and resource subscription management, and related services. Stephen Downes, the project leader:"

"A PLE (personal learning environment) is: a system that helps learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning, manage both content and process, and communicate with others in the process of learning. In contrast, a virtual learning environment (VLE) or learning management system (LMS), such as Blackboard or Moodle, is: a software system designed to help teachers by facilitating the management of educational courses for their students, especially by helping teachers and learners with course administration. The system can often track the learners' progress, which can be monitored by both teachers and learners. Notice the difference? A VLE/LMS is all about controlling how you learn. A PLE is about giving you control over how you learn."

Almost the first thing that gets built when anything needs management is a good measurement system. It allows tuning, enables detection of deviations from norm, and gives feedback on the effect of changes and initiatives. Communities of practice are complex creatures, and thus their measurement is not simple. The number of perspectives that can be used is enormous. At the same time, the availability of data for each of them is very different, and the temptation to use subjective management impressions is high. So the history of CoP management is full of references to indicator-building, to attempts at significant reporting, and to a wide variety of more or less objective measurements. But we have not found a coherent, complete set of measurements that could be used to consistently evaluate not just one CoP, but a set of them, and eventually even to benchmark different ones, along most of the lines that can be affected by management. So we've attempted to put forth a simple, practical list and brief explanation of straightforward indicators that can be implemented in most CoPs, and especially in those with an online component. The first result of it is the linked white paper, but it should not be the last one.

"Community manager is a role that more companies will adopt in the coming years. Jeremiah Owyang provide a huge list of companies who have such a champion already, and more recently gave businesses a scorecard for whether startups should have a community manager. "

"Project Management with Interactive Gantt from Smartsheet Where am I? This is a web page for Smartsheet, the easiest, fastest way to manage tasks, projects, issues and resources! Our interactive Gantt makes it easy to setup your project and task dependencies and adjust the details as plans change. "

Advice Advice to help you create, use and manage digital media * Managing Digitisation Projects Copyright and images, more... * Creating Digital Images Digital cameras, Scanners, more... * Delivering Digital Images Metadata, Managing images, more... * Finding & Using Digital Images Finding images online, Using images in teaching materials, more... * Vector & Animated Graphics Introduction to animated graphics, Illustrated glossary, more...

Welcome to Managing the Digital Enterprise®, an open educational resource that surveys the opportunities and challenges managers face in an increasingly digital world.

"Online community building is a key role of a the community manager, This role is a fairly new one, and although it has its roots in the roles of those who managed bulletin boards and discussion forums - when they were often known as facilitators - the role is still emerging and evolving. However, the role of a Community Manager is essentially to encourage, foster and support the engagement of participants in the community, although the way this takes place will depend on the nature and purpose of the online community"

"The mere promise of Google Wave inspired a rainbow of potential use cases, but Wave's best real-world use boils down to this: it helps a group get things done together. Here's how to manage a group project in Wave."

"Bernard Woods (Goss Gilroy Inc.) and I have developed a Methodology to provide a variety of stakeholders with a roadmap in addition to rigorous methods and tools for specifying and evaluating learning, training and development (LT&D). The Methodology gives senior managers, learning, training and development professionals, professional evaluators and similar stakeholders what they need to make a convincing case to senior management about improvements in work performance and organizational results. The Methodology is not positioned to replace other techniques and methods, but to complement them. We are trying to provide a more formal way for people to understand their business/work problems at a systemic level, assess if learning, training and development (LT&D) is useful for solving them and if so, provide a minimalist set of tools for evaluating LT&D initiatives that enable drawing a line of sight to organizational results. "

"Dave's five points about PLEs PLNs for PLENK2010 Here is my adaptation… * Point #1: I use the term personal learning network (PLN) to refer to all of the following: professional learning network, personal learning environment, learning management system, course management system, etc. A node that makes up a PLN can be a person, group, institution, online community, software program, etc. And it's personal if the learner (and not a teacher, trainer, expert, etc.) has control over which nodes to connect with and what type of interaction the learner prefers to have with each node."

"Keeping abreast of news in your niche can be tough. I know the feeling of being left behind, when you think you need to be checking thousands of feeds 24 hours a day. Fact is you do not need to have such a punishing regime. I have been known to follow stupidly excessive amounts of RSS feeds, plus my Twitter following got well out of hand. My feeds are now down to 300 and I am slowly trimming who I follow on Twitter. I'm down from 900 and some to hopefully approaching a manageable number below 700. This might still seem like a lot to you, how do I manage to follow so many feeds? Here are 21 tips for a more productive approach to keeping up with all the crucial developments in your niche. They will work for feeds or Twitter in most cases but I have aimed mainly at RSS:"

Home About the eLearning Network What is the eLN? The eLearning Network (eLN) is a non-profit organisation run by the elearning community for the elearning community. The eLN is the number one source for guidance on best practice and future trends in technology-based learning and development at work, with more than 1500 members in the UK and beyond. Here's why it has never been a better time to join the eLN: Inspiration Technology has never developed so quickly and with such far-reaching implications. You need information you can trust, practical advice and standards to aspire to. As a member of the eLN expect to be inspired: * The E-Learning Awards, run each year in conjunction with e.learning age magazine, provide a showcase for the very best elearning projects that the UK has to offer. In 2009, we are extending our programme to recognise talented practitioners in a wide range of disciplines from graphic design to project management. * Our 1-day conferences address the most critical issues faced by the elearning community and provide an opportunity to explore future trends. In 2009, we are looking at hot topics such as making the case for elearning, creating engaging and effective elearning content, the future of learning management systems, and next generation blended learning. * Our face-to-face events are supplemented by a series of free online events and, for the first time, premium webinars providing opportunities to interact with internationally-reknown experts.

"Sakai is an alternative Learning Management System, similar to WebCT. Brock evaluated WebCT and alternatives such as Sakai for use as Brock's primary Learning Management System (LMS) starting in the 2009 academic year. A Pilot of Sakai with 50 courses and 27 instructors was conducted for the 2007 academic year. Instructors had the option to include the course that they were teaching in this pilot. Sakai is a free and community source based product that offers a different take on learning on-line. Moodle, which was also being evaluated in a smaller scale is a free open source option. A representative advisory group was struck to co-ordinate the pilot and help shape the decision. Please feel free to leave informal feedback below. This group conducted a pilot and submitted the results (below) to the University Senate and the Provost and Vice-President. A decision was made by the Provost and Vice-President based on this information to implement a Sakai-based system as Brock's Primary LMS."

"I have just read Lisa Lane's article in First Monday entitled "Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching". I really liked her paper, not least because it raised some issues that I hadn't considered before regarding default settings in an LMS and the idea of opt in and opt out learning management systems. It also described the way many academics use (or don't use) the web in their work or play and how this effects their ability to use some of the more 'advanced' features of an LMS that go beyond an instructivist model of delivery. Perhaps most importantly of all it discusses the importance of emphasising pedagogy before 'features and tools' when working with web novices."

I liked the opt-in opt-out ideas. The issues raised about the contstraints imposed when customising or installing a cms are timely for us in terms of our new cms and in the light of the impending VLE review. Good food for thought here! The terms novice vs advanced instructors would make some for good debating. Who decides?

"Networks grow from separate nodes, to a hierarchical organization where one node manages the connections, but the true power of a network is unleashed when every node knows what the goal is and the nodes coordinate to achieve it. It is this unleashing of the power of the network that we want to facilitate. But if you build it, they may not come. Networks take nurturing. Using the gardener or landscaper metaphor, yesterday I said that networks need seeding, feeding, and weeding. "

"As promised, I am presenting a step-by-step approach to a low-cost knowledge management (KM) program using social computing, and will focus on the functionality that has been touted but rarely delivered by communities of practice (CoPs). The name brings to mind Etienne Wenger's pioneering work in observing naturally occurring use of virtual environments by engineers. The problem was that when people went from a researcher's description of what had grown naturally in the past to a prescriptive recipe, things went wrong. People never accurately report all the factors that lead to the success or failure of a project; retrospective coherence clicks in. Also, the fact that something worked once in a specific context does not mean that it will work again even in the same conditions, or that you can accurately replicate the starting conditions. The other big problem was that people built over structured, formal top-down systems that replicated the design methodologies for enterprisewide systems like SAP. So, let's look at a bottom-up, naturalizing approach to building communities for knowledge flow using blogs:"

"A full-featured web site-creation package solely for the academic community. Scholars create web sites in seconds and can easily manage everything themselves (for free)"