Group items tagged

"Discussion design and facilitation has an indispensable role in online education and is dependent on the development of carefully crafted questions."

"Prestridge identifies three professional learning activities vital for meaningful ICT teacher PD; collegial dialogue;investigation; and reflection. She chooses to investigate the role of collegial dialogue in developing learning communities and enabling pedagogical change. This is intended to inform a model for ICT professional development, using online discussion forums to facilitate discussion."

The #Facebook Effect: College Students' Perceptions of #Online #Discussions in the Age of #SocNet http://t.co/YzecYeoP (PDF via @hrheingold)

"'Massive open online courses: Higher Education's digital moment?' tracks the development of MOOCs from a small selection of specialist courses to major online platforms, offering hundreds of courses with millions of users.  The report explores MOOCs' surge in popularity and discusses whether this signals the beginning of a significant transformation in higher education, similar to those seen in other sectors, such as the newspaper industry. It pulls together the recent trends in online education delivery and looks at how universities can respond to the changing online environment."

"Adding audio instructions or commentary helps you meet the needs of auditory learners, and often adds interest to the content. Schiefelbein said she often creates an audio recording of housekeeping tasks, such as deadline reminders, as well as to review what was covered the previous session. She also uses the Wimba Voice Board to create an audio-based discussion board which students use to discuss topics and reply to posts."

"The manifesto for teaching online was a key output from the Student Writing project at the University of Edinburgh. It is a series of brief statements that attempt to capture what is generative and productive about online teaching, course design, writing, assessment and community. It is, and may remain, a living document that is reviewed and reworked periodically with colleagues, students and amongst the programme team of the MSc in E-learning programme. Its primary purpose is to spark discussion, and to articulate a position about e-learning that informs the work of the project team, and the MSc in E-learning programme more broadly. This position is best summarised by the first of the manifesto statements: Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit. Online can be the privileged mode."

Myth 1 - Online Learning Is Impersonal Myth 2 - Too Much Going On Myth 3 - My Class Is Unique Myth 4 - Blogs Are for Navel Gazing Myth 5 - Discussion Forums Push on Strings Myth 6 - Online Group Projects Are Impossible Myth 7 - Tech Problems Will Derail Teaching Myth 8 - You Cannot Convey Passion Online Myth 9 - Virtual Classroom as a Literal Translation Myth 10 - Faculty Training Is About Technology

"Social media is about conversation. This increasing emphasis on two way communication and conversation has transformed organisational communications and is crucial to effective online knowledge sharing. Communicators using online media use the term 'engagement' to describe the process of moving to a situation where users and producers interact online, discussing and sharing content."

"I've just been in an interesting panel discussion at the JISC Online Conference on the subject of 'digital literacy'. The recording of the Elluminate session is available. The session reinforced to me just how diverse people's views on digital literacies are. Most new to the field make the assumption that digital literacy is singular and consists of basic skills in the digital realm. In effect, digital competency. Those more experienced in the field, such as Helen Beetham, talk of the importance of this baseline - the 'ABC' of digital literacy as she called it, but higher-level skills as well."

The purpose of this study was to explore group forming strategies by examining participation behaviours during whole class discussions associated with active participation in a following small group activity. In-class behaviour correlated with online behaviour.

A report of some MOOC analysis of discussion forums. Sounds like the analysis is flawed from the report here.

"The ins and outs of online video There is a lot of discussion at present about video content at present including from the Minister, regulator, broadcasters, new competitors, ISPs, and commentators (not to mention TUANZ itself: ed). This post tries to make sense of all that. It looks at the state of broadcasting in New Zealand and reviews the prospects for greater competition. Part 1 sets out how things look at present, and explains some of the basic issues. Part 2 looks at where the market might be headed, and whether the government needs to get more directly involved."

"All students today are increasingly expected to develop technological fluency, digital citizenship, and other twenty-first century competencies despite wide variability in the quality of learning opportunities schools provide. Social network sites (SNSs) available via the internet may provide promising contexts for learning to supplement school-based experiences. This qualitative study examines how high school students from low-income families in the USA use the SNS, MySpace, for identity formation and informal learning. The analysis revealed that SNSs used outside of school allowed students to formulate and explore various dimensions of their identity and demonstrate twenty-first century skills; however, students did not perceive a connection between their online activities and learning in classrooms. We discuss how learning with such technologies might be incorporated into the students overall learning ecology to reduce educational inequities and how current institutionalized approaches might shift to accommodate such change."

"Within a week of the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a library surfaced in the midst of the protest. Staffed by volunteers and comprised entirely of donated materials, the People's Library offers books and media to the public, provides basic reference assistance and has built an online catalog of their holdings. In this paper, I analyze the People's Library in terms of larger discussions of libraries, technology and activism. Drawing on personal experiences volunteering at the Library as well as text from the Library's blog, I argue that the People's Library offers two counter arguments to conventional claims about the public library: first, that libraries are being existentially threatened by the emergence of digital technologies and second, that a library's institutional ethics are located solely or predominantly in the content of its collection. Using the People's Library as a kind of conceptual case study, I explore the connections between public libraries, digital technologies and activist ideologies."

Free, online LMS which seems to be used at some of the Ivy league American universities if the home page is to be believed... Includes discussions, calendar, library (for your resources) and a gradebook.

Many mooc discussions at Online Educa - report by Donald Clark.

Using the Kaltura video extension for Moodle, teachers can upload and manage rich-media content, such as full lectures in an online course; students can then post video comments, ask questions and create a face-to-face discussion recorded directly from their webcam or other sources.

"There are countless websites offering images, video and audio files for use in education, but it's not always easy to know which sites are most useful or appropriate. This advice document discusses general tools and strategies for finding digital resources and looks at many of the sites you can use as reliable sources."