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This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award. For more information on Sir Ken's work visit: http://www.sirkenrobinson.com

Helen, I like Sir Ken Robinson's stuff, but I do take it with a grain of salt as well. Like Gladwell, he's a good storyteller and can inspire, but everything's got to be taken in context. I love that you ask your students to follow their train of thought. I do that with my kids, and find I often have to explain my own train of thought to others. I like the way you are in tune with the benefits and risks of reflective practice. It can get messy, and it isn't always the best thing for every student. It sounds like you take extra steps to make sure they understand the value of it.

Helen, thanks for underlining the Evoke game. I did find it - www.urgentevoke.com - and was impressed by what a great representative of eLearning this was. Organized, engaging, lots of information - but what I liked most was that it led to action - i.e., the gaming playing is not just on the computer - but actions you take or are encouraged to take to make a difference.

Hmmmm. . . .I'm digesting this one to determine its relevance to instructional design for elementary and middle school students. More later.

(Oops! Please disregard my accidental "bookmarking." I have been having problems with my Diigo site not listing the "comment" button. I was fooling around with it this morning.) Thanks, Jennifer for finding this wonderfully concise blog on the role of ID's in training and education. I have been volunteering to design a training product simply to learn more tech skills and have been thinking about ID work. Although I can easily make the distinction between a "training course" and an on-line course, there remain some fundamental considerations for how instructors "deliver" information and "design" learning activities which influence both professions. When blogger, Syreya Dutta, states " . . . the fact is that the way people are learning today has changed phenomenally due to the increased access to social media tools and advanced mobile devices. Twitter, blogs, wikis, and discussions have become the new age learning methods." So my question - "If social media networks enable better knowledge feedbacks, do educators have to be active users of each and how many should be incorporated into the learning activities of the courses they design ?"

There is a website that shows about the eLearning network in Washington state! :)

The trend for businesses to go online with learning seems to have really taken hold. I know University of Washington also uses an on-line training system, both for optional and mandatory training.

Interesting. I don't remember ever seeing that before. I'll have to check it out some more.

This is my favorite site to learn about powerful presentation techniques.

I think it is than...

I'm a little slow on the uptake, but the potato salad discussion was great!! I like bacon and sour cream in mine--but on the serious side--life, education, teaching, learning, ad infinitum, are rarely black and white; you are so correct, Jennifer, in the longer comment you addressed to Ann and me about the challenge centering around these things not having to be one way or the other because there are so many other factors involved.

This website is geared more toward corporate training vs. higher education. I found it interesting and helpful for me in my role at work.

This seems to have a great support on tools, which is always needed and helpful.

Elluminate Live! Quick Reference Guide for Participants

This guide will help you get started with Elluminate Live!

This is an overview of a guideline for how learning occurs and how as teachers we can focus our lessons to this guideline. It is relevant in on-line education, as the on-line environment allows us to have different modes to provide information to our students. We can utilize everything from video to chat rooms.

Ann, do you have any tools or taxonomies that have helped you develop those questioning skills? And have you got any experience using the SOLO taxonomy?

I have not had experience with SOLO - Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes - but from the bit of investigation I have done, it is similiar to Bloom's in that it is based upon the notion that a studen'ts ability to grasp more abstract concepts, is based on more fundamental understandings and that you need to make sure you are not too advanced for where the student is. It reminds me of Piaget's concept that you can only learn something that is slightly more advanced than where you are (my paraphrase). As for my experience with help in developing questioning skills, which I feel is an excellent example of elearning, is that my company had us first take an interactive tutorial on Bloom's taxonomy. The "final" was taking a math problem and providing questions for each level of the taxonomy. We posted this on a dedicated discussion, with the teacher providing her response for everyone to see and learn from. We have since started another topic where teacher can post specific questions they are using and have tried and this will eventually be collected into a reference document. For example, one idea that was shared was that you after you have tested your student on a fundamental, you can ask them to give you a problem. My experience is that I often get back something I didn't expect. Like if adding decimels, they will return with a problem that might be in the millionths rather than the tenths. What I found most useful was not these specifics or having a question for each level, as much as the consciousness raising it did for me to think more creatively in helping the students. I have found that an elearning platform is very helpful in this regard. For example, they might take a lesson on adding or subtracting fractions and another on adding or subtracting decimels. I will then give them a problem in adding both - example - 1/2 + .25 = . By having an interactive whiteboard I can see how they convert the fraction to a decimal to add them and offer guidan

"Video has become relatively inexpensive to produce, and because we all have a lifetime of experience with watching video, it's easy to believe that we understand how to communicate reasonably well using video as a medium."

Its an interesting thought that all video, including those for elearning objectives, is really story-telling and one must utilize the medium - such as panning the camera - is important. I hadn't thought of video as story-telling, but it is a good way to think about how to structure a video lesson. A story has a beginning, middle, and end and it needs to engage the "listerner".

This is an organization for eLearning, mostly geared toward corporate training vs. academic. There is some very good information through this web site to include many good articles. They have different levels of membership, one of which is at no cost.

This is a great site! One of the posts was about mLearning (mobile device learning as opposed to eLearning -online). It made me consider how electronic learning could be more encompassing.

I'll withhold judgment on this. What do you think?

I have one thought about this. California has been ahead of WA when it comes to turning out online teacher/instructors for community colleges. I could get the training I am now, at the U of CA (not certain which one) and at U of Utah; but this program on BC is new.

This week the focus is on assessment and evidence of understanding. The emphasis is, of course, on how we assess our students. However, eteachers can be more easily observed, so I thought the community might find it interesting as to how I, as an eteacher, am assessed. (The students do an automated self-paced lesson and then take a practice quiz. If they have questions during the lesson or in order to go the next one, we interact. Based on the quiz and other questions/discussions we have, I pass them to the next lesson. I have up to 4 students in one session.) Once a month, my supervisor listens to one of the recorded sessions and writes up an assessment. What I find interesting that is unique to elearning, is that my use of the technology environment goes into my assessment. I need to be logged in on time, I need to effectively switch among my students, etc. Also, if an area is weak, a request by my supervisor to re-take an automated class I have taken before - such as effective questioning - might be assigned.

The online environment provides for easy capture of the session. The requirement for teaching include having a degree and a background check, but not a teaching certificate. I feel the monitoring is an extra check and balance on both how we are teaching and our online presence. We go through training and have guidelines on what we can and cannot discuss with the students - such as sharing emails, contacts outside of class, etc. Recently this has come into focus, as the regular school teachers at the school I am tutoring with (we are a scheduled once a week class during the school year) encouraged the students to ask where we live, etc., to feel more connected. On our teacher platform, the teachers and our supervisor were able to post and share with each other on how they were and should be handling this. It is a balance - just as in a regular classroom - to be connected, yet have privacy. I do not find what information I should and should share or ask to be a problem for me, but the time focus is. The students are used to texting all the time and feel comofrtable with using the time that way. I have now developed my own transitions - from the explicit: "we've chatted enough for right now, please go on with your lesson" to a softer transition by using the information in our dialog to set-up a problem: You got so much snow! So if you had eight snowballs and split them evenly....".

This is fascinating! I've honestly never seen an instrument for a supervisor to evaluate an online teaching session. (Or maybe I just don't remember.) For distance education at BC, instructors/divisions can opt in to the online student evaluations. I don't know if Norma signed up to have this course included in the evals. If so, you may have received access to that today. As far as I know, that's the primary way teachers are evaluated here. It compares to how they are evaluated in f2f classes. For me, I like to get constant feedback from students, and that's why you see me poking around a lot, sending lots of email, and including self-checks. It's always an awful feeling to get to the end of a course and discover you could have made changes early on that would have made a big difference in learning. (But I always expect to discover some of that at the end, as well!) Thanks for sharing this!

I have made some personal comments on obtaining the skills and not being able to get the job one trains for.

To elaborate on your: " My point is this, giving my student the skills to do the job they hope to do in the future is not the end of the learning process." School has the dual purpose of both enlightening us as people and preparing us for a profession. As this article points out, obtaining a degree or going to school does not guarantee of a job. It may not guarantee a job, but without you can't have the insight or credential to eventually get there.

What deeply saddens me is technical and community colleges may give you the skills; but then they may drop the ball by not helping beyond that point. Without internships and situations for obtaining experience...one cannot overcome the obstacle of needing experience in the field. Same goes for my hope to teach...which may just be a dream I am holding onto with no basis in reality. Then the feds paid for the courses, the college got the money and I am in fact the loser.

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help. He says students from around the world can tutor each other. This presentation was just given a few days ago.

Bruce, I have to say that this TED video posting you put up is the most interesting post I've looked at all quarter! Salman Khan talks about a very unique "backwards design" for education now and in the future with his suggestion that the "lectures--videos" be watched at home and the "homework" be done interactively with the teacher at school. In reality, this concept is the very one I was trained to do way back when I was getting my teaching credential for elementary school. In that model, teachers interact consistently all day long with small and large groups of students and individual students as well, helping them with what they need to understand until some sort of mastery comes. The only appreciable difference that I can see is the use of today's technology tools. A good teacher, no matter if face to face in a classroom or remotely in cyber space, will take the time with each individual student until he or she learns what is being taught. Self-paced learning such as what the TED video centered on was practiced years ago with SRA reading modules and similar modules for math. They fell out of fashion in many schools when districts began standardizing learning and "no child left behind" came along with its requirement that all students meet a particular standard in a particular way. Perhaps I'm over-simplifying things a bit, but I feel compelled to share this. Someone once said, "There are no new ideas under the sun, just new ways of implementing them." Anyway, thanks for this posting--I will eagerly look forward to how the Khan University develops!

Wow...thanks for sharing this link. I've watched the documentary "Waiting for Superman" and was blown away about how our education system is failing so badly. Here's an example of what person can do and change the way we learn.

Hybrid Class QM video. About an hour long.

This is a great example of student response to posting an hour long video. I've found most students don't want to take the time to watch something for an hour. If you are in instructor and would like students to watch a long video, how do you motivate them to do it? And how do you decide whether the long video is the best way to help them learn? Also, how do we balance the amount of resources we provide learners, with giving them time to find things on their own?

First of all, it is a video that you have to want to view. Students may or may not view it. It shoud be informative; but not mandatory. That way, those who are truly interested will watch and those that are not will not. The same can be said about those who have the time. There is a little nav tool under the video to Fast Forward as well. Hour long videos should be presented to those who want an official or gov reponse to a need or issue. Resources are optional or can be made optional. I would not want to limit the possibilities of my learners!