Group items tagged

Doug Belshaw on Openness in education and its fit with digital literacy. Watch slides at end if not seen before.

"Focusing on these essential elements of digital literacies and the principles we wish to instil in young people is, I believe, a better way to teach IT than a narrow focus on procedural software skills. For more on the essential elements of digital literacies, see this Slideshare presentation..."

"Learning Space as Creation Space The next generation of learning spaces will take all the characteristics of an active learning environment-flexibility, collaboration, team-based, project-based-and add the capability of creating and making. Project teams will be both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and will likely need access to a broad array of technologies. High-speed networks, video-based collaboration, high-resolution visualization, and 3-D printing are but a few of the digital tools that will find their way into the learning space. The ability to rearrange furniture and technology quickly and easily will be highly desirable. Some project activities will need nothing more than comfortable furniture, food, and caffeine. Others will require sophisticated computational analysis and the ability to do rapid prototyping. Acoustics will be a concern and will need to accommodate a wide range of activities. It seems likely that such space will support more than one team or activity simultaneously. That will be a highly desirable trait, fostering serendipitous discovery and innovation. The ability to quickly and easily capture the group's activities and progress will also be desirable. An emerging class of powerful and effective collaboration tools enables project teams to save and store project elements, resources, concepts, plans, designs, models, and renderings-in short, all the "stuff" that a team might find or make."

Moodle doesn't encourage good course design. Interesting post by James Clay and it gives me 2 thoughts.  Should we change the way we start people off on Moodle so course design comes first and then some mechanics.  The other thought is could we write a wizard (or some such thing) that leads people through the big picture design of their course and then helps them populate it with appropriate elements?

Rationale, pedagogy and links for using audio in HE. Note elements of intimacy, reducing transactional distances.

"Microsoft Research Cliplets is an interactive app that gives users the power to create "Cliplets" -- a type of imagery that sits between stills and video, including imagery such as video textures and "cinemagraphs". The app provides a simple, yet expressive way to mix static and dynamic elements from a video clip."

A few months ago, I discovered MentorMob (MM), which allows any user to create "learning playlists" to share or open up to other fellow learners who might want to add or edit the content in the playlist. The end product is the ultimate learning tool for students, especially when the playlist is populated with high-quality content, including visual, audio and interactive elements. MM playlists make sense because they "scaffold" learning in a very visual and intuitive way. The lists are simple to make, follow, edit, co-author and collaborate. "

"With different features within Yammer you can add elements to your training programs to keep the learning going before and after the training event."

"Gamification [n]: the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. Gamification has tremendous potential in the education space. How can we use it to deliver truly meaningful experiences to students?"

page by Helen Barrett on using Google Apps to provide an eportfolio for educational institutions

"This Google Site has been set up by Dr. Helen Barrett to focus on the use of Google Apps to create ePortfolios. On this site, there are instructions on how to use the different elements of Google Apps to maintain e-portfolios. "

The simple act of copying can increase your creativity. Here are 7 foundational elements of copying.

What SB has on his desk!

This article proposes a model to integrate the traditionally conflicting objectivism and constructivist approaches to curriculum design.It is argued that these two are not opposing paradigms, but complementing approaches.A number of analyses of learning programs are discussed to show that learning events contain both objectivist and constructivist elements. Plotting the two approaches at right angles to one another produces four quadrants of conditions of learning. These four quadrants are discussed together with the rationales for each.

graph.tk is an online and open-source graphing utillity. It runs in any modern browser that supports the canvas element. It plots functions, and displays them with style.

Stuff from a presentation Doug gave to Australian conference.

"LectureTools is not lecture capture. It is a tool designed to help student engagement during your lecture. It offers a variety of ways for profs to build in interactive elements into the lecture..."

Quite a good overview of elements required for building an online community by Kevin Wilcoxon. Uses the Anderson, Garrison and Archer model as its core theory.

"The project funds student partnerships in various disciplines to develop online learning resources using specialist software. This complements our partnership with Jisc on their Developing digital literacies project which aims to give students digital skills by encouraging HE curriculums to include digital elements."

In effect, the Anderson/Garrison teacher presence element of CoI

Article on student use of a VLE /  LMS using data from 2 years of surveys.