Group items tagged

"Blended learning is a disruptive innovation in education that can take many forms. Here, we look at what blended learning is, why it's spreading, and how it works in real and virtual classrooms."

How organisations grow and learn. - by Downes

Hype Cycle tracks innovations through stages - technology trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, plateau of productivity. Can't see MOOCs any where on this graph! 

Excellent piece by Terry Anderson on the fall out from Thrun's elitist about turns and why one swallow a Spring does not make.

Terry Anderson gets annoyed with some poor research on audio feedback.

Info on Monash and use of Moodle, Mahara, Google and MeTL.

Enterprise immersive software is a collection of collaboration, communication, and productivity tools unified via a 3D or pseudo-3D visual environment. In this computer-generated environment, one or more people engage in work activities like meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The software provides a shared, interactive, multichannel experience through presence awareness, voice chat, active speaker indication, text chat, and many other features, often including avatars. The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In this report, we present "if/then" scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The report offers guidance on how to: 1) ask core business questions to frame the discussion, 2) choose a research-and-demo, do-it-yourself, or combination approach, 3) identify requirements based on your use case, and 4) filter your options based on important limiters.

Long post and comments on the vle vs the ple by John Fontaine, head of 'Platform Evangelism' at BB. Interesting that he appears to view the vle as a transmitter and instructor driven and I wonder if this then justifies the rest of his thinking on the role of technology.

Terry Anderson reflects on his NZ visit: "New Zealand is doing a great job of supporting the development of high quality teaching and learning in tertiary education."

"This evaluation report compares four software applications at opposite ends of the cost spectrum: DimDim, Elluminate VCS, TokBox, and Vyew."

The Writing Researcher is a new open activity which aims to bring researchers from different disciplines, institutions and countries together to share their writing and provide peer-feedback ina rather informal, friendly environment. ... As it reads in the blog we have set up for the project, The Writing Researcher: Inspiration, Creativity, Fluency  aims to: 1. promote and support writing as a creative, scholarly and collaborative enterprise, 2. encourage discussion and peer feedback in a distributed, shared environment, 3. establish an international, inter-disciplinary, inter-cultural peer network.

A new paper reports that the prevalence of cheating among online students is much less than among on-campus students. The study also highlights the danger of distance and disengagement for online students and staff resulting in erroneous perceptions of the relative frequency of cheating among these cohorts.

hosted solution from IBM using open-sim but with some custom collaboration and RW integration, looks like with some Lotus suite, some great features.

"... wearable computers allow people to do things like google information straight into their eyeballs while chatting on the street corner - or project a map overlay on the street in front of them, labeling every store. Or turn the local vacant lot into a wonderland filled with Pokemon characters ready to do battle. This is an augmented reality scenario. Now our technology can actually do this, using smart phones as a crude mobile interface. In these demo videos below, we're getting a first glimpse of what happens when the internet comes out of the box and into the real world"