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"The main scientific problems investigated in this article deal with technical evaluation of quality attributes of the main components of e-Learning systems (referred to here as DLEs - Digital Libraries of Educational Resources and Services), i.e., Learning Objects (LOs) and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). The main research object of the work is the effectiveness of methods of DLE components quality evaluation. The aim of the article is to analyse popular existing LO and VLE technical evaluation tools, and to formulate new more complex tools for technical quality evaluation of LOs and VLEs based on requirements for flexible DLE, as well as to evaluate most popular open source VLEs against new more complex criteria. Complex tools have been created for the evaluation of DLE components, based on a flexible approach. The authors have analysed existing tools for technical evaluation of LOs, and it was investigated that these tools have a number of limitations. Some of these tools do not examine different LO life cycle stages, and other insufficiently examine technical evaluation criteria before LO inclusion in the repository. All these tools insufficiently examine LOs reusability criteria. Therefore a more complex LO technical evaluation tool is needed. It was considered that this new more complex LO technical evaluation tool should include LO technical evaluation criteria suitable for different LO life cycle stages, including criteria before, during and after LO inclusion in the repository as well as LO reusability criteria. The authors have also examined several VLE technical evaluation tools suitable for flexible DLE, and it was investigated that these tools have a number of limitations. Several tools practically do not examine VLE adaptation capabilities criteria, and the other insufficiently examines general technical criteria. A more complex VLE technical evaluation tool is needed. Therefore the authors have proposed an original more complex set of VLE tech

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...

Voices Carry I was feeling really restless early last week about our ability to run and manage new and emerging services in a World where change happens at a pace that is nearly out of control. I thought my post, Why Run a Service would be a signal that I've come to a conclusion that there are real reasons to try and keep up. I didn't honestly expect it to strike the chord it did, but when you ask people interesting questions you sometimes get more interesting questions in return that demand to be explored. Lots of killer conversation going on in the comments of that post … one particular thread emerged about how encouraging open writing and blogging can generate greater depth of connections within our community. That last word is the really important piece to us - how we work to engage our community to embrace these emergent trends is what we think will ultimately make what we do more interesting and important. The more they participate, the more we can contribute opportunities to change teaching and learning.

" All Things in Moderation | E-moderating | 5 stage model The 5 stage model This model, how it was researched and developed, is explained in much more detail in chapter 2 of the book. Here's a summary: Individual access and the ability of participants to use CMC are essential prerequisites for conference participation (stage one, at the base of the flights of steps). Stage two involves individual participants establishing their online identities and then finding others with whom to interact. At stage three, participants give information relevant to the course to each other. Up to and including stage three, a form of co-operation occurs, i.e. support for each person's goals. At stage four, course-related group discussions occur and the interaction becomes more collaborative. The communication depends on the establishment of common understandings. At stage five, participants look for more benefits from the system to help them achieve personal goals, explore how to integrate CMC into other forms of learning and reflect on the learning processes. Each stage requires participants to master certain technical skills (shown in the bottom left of each step). Each stage calls for different e-moderating skills (shown on the right top of each step). The "interactivity bar" running along the right of the flight of steps suggests the intensity of interactivity that you can expect between the participants at each stage. At first, at stage one, they interact only with one or two others. After stage two, the numbers of others with whom they interact, and the frequency, gradually increases, although stage five often results in a return to more individual pursuits."

When times are tough, institutions are under more competitive pressure than ever to do well for their students. Unfortunately this is the precise time when cash is in short supply, faculty workloads may have increased, and development/support staff and budgets are often slashed. For institutions that want to do a more effective job of competing and meeting external demands for quality, it's time for a more frugal approach to innovation. One approach to frugal innovation: help faculty share low-cost, low-risk, easy-to-explain improvements in teaching and learning with each other.  That's really two ideas, and they go well together: Faculty helping each other improve their courses (with a slight assist from staff to help them get together) Low Threshold Activities and Applications (LTAs) -- small steps toward improvement -- that each faculty member can grasp quite quickly and try safely, easily, and inexpensively and that promise real rewards if successful, e.g.  better learning, time-savings.  (For on LTAs, click here.)  "Frugal": These kinds of improvements are a good fit for peer-to-peer assistance because LTAs can be communicated quickly and easily: e.g., in: a casual conversation among faculty, a 5-15 minute workshop scheduled as an agenda item in a departmental meeting and led by a faculty member, a page-long description written by a faculty member and appearing on the web or in a newsletter, an eClip (brief video clip online that explains how to do something or why it's worth doing), or just a few sentences in an email or on a web page.

"There's more to using social media tools than just quick updates and playful banter among friends. Sure, you can post pictures on Facebook, tell friends what you're doing via Twitter, and upload videos of your roommates doing something crazy to YouTube. But social media can be useful, too. More than 2,000 colleges across the country use Blackboard's online learning system-an online tool that allows professors to post assignments, schedules, questions, and more information while keeping the conversation with students going outside of class. Plus, countless colleges and universities use the usual suspects like Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter to interact with students, and students can use those tools to enhance their online profile for employment purposes. Yet as much as these technological tools have become commonplace on campus, there's still a caveat: The Internet can be misused, and missteps can be costly. "

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments Posted January 7th, 2009 by Michael Wesch , Kansas State University Tags: * Essays * Teaching and Technology * anthropology * Assessment * information revolution * multimedia * participatory learning * Web 2.0 2 Comments | 9313 Page Views Knowledge-able Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative. As I recently wrote in a Britannica Online Forum: There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.1 This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.

Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter Picture 6.jpg At 10:15 pm I discovered that I had not brought a Macbook power supply on the trip. I was in a hotel on Coronado Island, and early the next morning I was flying to an aircraft carrier off San Diego for an overnight visit. I doubted that the carrier had Macbook power supplies laying around, so I was in trouble. I posted a message to Twitter that I was in this predicament, and within ten minutes, five people offered to bring me a power supply. I took one of them up on the offer, and he delivered it to me within an hour. This illustrates the practical implications of a large following on Twitter. In addition, of course, there is the sheer vanity of amassing more followers than your friends. The question, "How do I get more followers on Twitter?" is unspoken because admitting that you want more followers is to acknowledge that you don't have many. Thus, you probably don't need this advice, but you may "have a friend" who will find it useful.

Soren Gordhamer writes and consults on ways we can more creatively and effectively use the technologies of our age, including social media. He is the author of "Wisdom 2.0″ (HarperOne, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter at @SorenG. It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. In recent years social media, likely more than anything else, has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade. But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Here are the top areas that social media has affected in our daily lives.

Soren Gordhamer writes and consults on ways we can more creatively and effectively use the technologies of our age, including social media. He is the author of "Wisdom 2.0″ (HarperOne, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter at @SorenG. It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. In recent years social media, likely more than anything else, has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade. But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Here are the top areas that social media has affected in our daily lives.

"Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services - think apps - are less about the searching and more about the g 1 etting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures."

Elearning is growing and evolving hand in glove with a constellation of technologies that have their roots in a number of places. One is in collaboration software. If we look back to the origins of the internet (ARPANET) through to today's big emphasis on "Web 2.0" tools, there is a constant thread of the dynamic interplay between technology and the groups using it. The early software was written because scientists needed better ways to collaborate. Usenet evolved as more and more people started using it, creating both technological and social demands on the system. Personal publishing - while easier today with blogs and wikis - has been around since the early nineties, giving voice to people in new ways that ranged wider than their geographic communities, creating learning connections that span the globe. Community influences technology and technology influences community. This is true in the application of technology for learning.

Faculty Development Programming: If We Build It, Will They Come? Added by the EDUCAUSE Librarian Author(s):Ann H. Taylor and Carol McQuiggan View a PDF of this article © 2008 Ann Taylor and Carol McQuiggan. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3 (July-September 2008) Faculty Development Programming: If We Build It, Will They Come? A faculty development survey analyzed what faculty want and need to be successful teaching online By Ann Taylor and Carol McQuiggan The number of courses offered online grows every year, resulting in an increasing number of higher education faculty entering a virtual classroom for the first time.1 It has been well documented that faculty need training and assistance to make the transition from teaching in a traditional face-to-face classroom to teaching online.2 Faculty professional development related to teaching online varies widely, from suggested readings to mandated training programs. Various combinations of technological and pedagogical skills are needed for faculty to become successful online educators, and lists of recommended competencies abound. Although many institutions have offered online courses for more than a decade and train their faculty to teach online, the research literature reveals that little is known about how best to prepare faculty to teach in an online environment. Designers of faculty development programs typically rely on commonly held assumptions about what faculty need to know-a constant guessing game regarding what topics to cover and what training formats to use. The resulting seminars, workshops, training materials, and other resources are typically hit-or-miss in terms of faculty participation and acceptance. To provide faculty with the proper training and resources for online teaching requires more information to determine

Welcome to the Global Innovation Network www.ginnn.com is THE social network and community of practice dedicated to facilitating innovation and business development by bringing together businesses, entrepreneurs, academics, researchers and investors in one place. The more you put in to this community the more you will get out - so join in and get involved.

First Experience Asssessing E-Portfolios December 17, 2008 by Terry Anderson As an instructor in Athabasca University's Master of Distance Education program, I was involved in providing an e-portfolio option to replace the standard comprehensive exam process for non thesis route students. The old 'comps' consisted of the candidate writing yet two more essays on material covered in the porgram and defending the essays with two faculty members via audio conference. As students in our program write at least 30 papers over the course of the 11 courses in the program the added value of writing yet two more seems of little value. We use the elgg platform with its "presentation" plugin to create the e-portfolio. We extracted the graduate competencies from throughout the program and then required students to demonstrate with a blog reflection and an artifact or two from their course work or 'real life' to show how they have achieved this competence. The assignment also called for a final terminal "reflection" on the whole program and the e-portfolio exercise.

"As I'm getting more and more into using Google Wave, I'm coming to appreciate its collaborative value. The only way that I'm using it right now is as follows: I come up with an idea. I want another opinion about the idea. I write it up in Wave. I share it with others and get them to collaborate with me. "

"I'm delivering the opening keynote for Edinburgh University's IT Futures Conference today and was asked to deliver an expanded version of the work I've been doing on the physical spaces of learning, and how they transgress virtual learning spaces, too. The theme of the conference is fascinating, and a conversation I'd like to see happening more regularly in more schools: It will look at both the staff and student perspective of what the working space is, and is becoming. Where does technology fit in, and how do we work and study in this increasingly mobile world?"

Academia 2.0: What Would a Fully Interactive Journal Article Look Like May 14th, 2009by Sean Gorman We've been collaborating with our co-founders back at George Mason for the last few months on a paper modeling oil dependency/vulnerability from a geographic perspective. We wrapped up the paper yesterday and it got me thinking about what a fully interactive version of the paper would look like. What if all the maps and charts were embeds? What if you could download all the data sets used for the analysis right from the paper? While many journal have come online and some even in openly accessible venues - I don't think we've really tapped the power of the Web for interactivity, data sharing, innovation, or peer review. Having more interactivity in charts and maps could make research more accessible and engaging. Further, having the data for a paper downloadable could provide better peer review, and create the opportunity to innovate and extend the research. A fellow resercher could have an idea to extend or optimize an equartion test it on the same data set and see if it yielded better results.

15 useful Firefox extensions for bloggers by Don Reisinger As a Firefox user and blogger, I realized not too long ago that the best way to be more efficient was to find useful add-ons for the Mozilla Web browser. After trying a variety of Firefox extensions, I've found 15 that do a fine job of making my blogging more productive.

'Meta-reading': the generational differences in consuming news May 13th, 2009Posted by Judith Townend in Events, Online Journalism, Social media and blogging Turi Munthe, CEO and founder of the citizen journalism site, Demotix, shared an interesting thought with participants of the Voices Online Blogging Conference on Monday. The young Demotix interns consume news differently from the way he does. He elaborated to Journalism.co.uk after the panel. 'Meta-reading': "There is a generational split, but not in the way everyone imagines. It's much more recent than that," he said. People only ten years younger - he is in his 30s - consume news differently from the way he does, Munthe told Journalism.co.uk. The interns in the office ('who play a hugely important role: they're regional editors and they get properly stuck into what we do') read slightly differently, he said. "They are getting the Twitter feeds, and the blog posts, and the Facebook messaging and the free papers, and everything else, and are very happy with it. Much more happy with it than I am." "Essentially, they process information differently. It's a 'meta-reading'. It's not about individual brands. They are fully aware of all the back-stories of all the stories they're getting," he says. It's a 'degree of sophistication,' he said, 'which reads the interests behind the news as an integral part of the news'.

Daily Awesome Tips, Tricks, Cheats And Review!! Twitter Toolbox: 70+ Awesome Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins And Services with 2 comments Twitter is hot and making an impact on social networking on the web. With the recent Twitter race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN as well as Tweetie just released for the Mac, Twitter is becoming more and more significant in the social networking and social media world. It is no wonder Twitter is a great platform for many awesome extensions to develop. In this post, we will show you to 70+ Twitter apps, add-ons, services, mashups and plugins to enhance your Twitter experience. Please help us spread this post on Twitter if you liked this article!! All of the Twitter apps listed below are free unless otherwise stated: