Leading Innovation in Global Education & Training

The 2006 Lisbon Conference brings together Business Educators, Academics, and Professionals in the fields of Education, HR, Training and Development to exchange ideas and knowledge about innovative learning practices in business education and training for global business change.

Details [here]

ECAR study of students and information technology, 2005.

ECAR study of students and information technology, 2005. Convenience, connection, control and learning.

Suggests that asking the next generation of students about IT in learning is like asking a fish to describe water! i.e. it is such an integral part of the environment that it seems so obvious... they will be here soon!

134 page PDF [here]

We can have our own Wiki

It would seem possible that we can create our own wiki. Clicking this post's title takes you out to the MediaWiki site for info on how to get a wiki. Worth checking is the sourceforge link at the bottom of the page, where you're able to download the software.

Here's how it might be used:

• for graduate students to learn about web 2.0, open source and the implication of these on formal learning - and consequently, on their practice as knowledge managers/co-creators/workers/teachers & trainers
• with wikipedia entries, as a peer-assessment tool, measured in some sort of 'use-value' unit (?)
• for educational programmes (informal, of course:) on the philosophy of education - notably, when addressing the thorny epistemological topic of truth claims and the need to establish criteria by which knowledge(s) is validated
• for deliberately de-centering the diadic teacher-student relationship on those educational endeavours grounded in 'the job as cirricula' ethos
• as experimental re-search into issues of intellectual property rights of academic knowledge

Networked Learning and Blackboard?

I found this interesting paper written by the CEO of BlackBoard.
The white paper suggests:

"A Networked Learning Environment in the Internet age applies new technology to a very old concept— that learning is much more than classes and grades. It is about the learning that takes place in a vibrant community of people and resources. The Internet has removed the limits of time and proximity that once restricted this community. In a true Networked Learning Environment, any student, instructor or researcher can access any learning resource at anytime from anyplace"

There is a a bit of a sales pitch for Blackboard but makes the point that networked learning is more that just online courses... and involves people being able to access and contribute ideas and learning materials anywhere, anytime.

Access it [here]

Was Web 1.0 the right boat to catch?

I just emailed (so last year!) a colleague in our exec development unit to request some information on Blooms taxonomy of educational outcomes. I received a polite reply saying that she was 'out of the office until Monday'. Luckily I found what I needed via Wikipedia... As users become more familiar with online resources, Web2.0 tools, etc. resources like Wikis will become increasingly utilized.

We've Missed the Boat on Web 1.0 - long live Web 2.0!

I think we've missed the boat on web 1.0. It slipped away.

All this talk of web 1.0 or web 2.0 can be ignored or passed off as techno-hype; just so much jargon to satisfy the impulses of creative web-o-philes; an empty marketing trope that attempts to authenticate a transition-less transition. But then again, maybe we need to get out more? If Google is anything to go by, web 2.0's score of 290,000 hits is a pretty impressive testimony of this concept's stickiness. Of course it begs the question, 'what was web 1.0?' And this is my point. If the web had a pre-history, then the neolithic, mesolithic and iron age of the web were the late nineties and early noughties, when static pages and web applications ruled the earth. Roarrr! The fossils of this period of web pre-history still survive though, intact in cloistered mindsets that are racing to catch up with a revolution that has passed (read, for instance, our recent statement "the web is, above all, a “shop window” and front door..."). We've missed the boat on web 1.0 - it's too late to grasp the affordances of these static pages, despite our trying. Thankfully, though, it is not too late to ride the wave of web 2.0: and this is the opportunity facing us. Any takers?

Bloglines

Create a personal Bloglines page loaded with the freshest news about the things you love. [here]

IPOD in education

This must be worth a look

Youtube

Another web 2.0 concept. This time it is shared video! [here]

Longroadmedia

This is a site from a sixth-form college, in Cambridge who have developed a subject-based blog to provide up-to-date information and commentary on their subject area, as well as posting questions and assignments, and linking to relevant news stories and websites. It is run by a guy called Pete Fraser. Visit [here]

Seconds out, round two

The explosion of new web services - such as 'blogs' and 'wikis' - has led many to believe that the internet is now entering a second phase. It's finally beginning to resemble a truly interactive learning tool, says Stephen O'Hear [here]

Journal of Learning Design

Edited by Allison Brown of QUT, who we met last week in Houston, the website says "The Journal of Learning Design (JLD) is a bi-annual, refereed journal which is issued in February and July. It is a venue for the dissemination of valuable and significant works by educational and training practitioners that have resulted in enhanced learning outcomes for students. Manuscripts are refereed by at least two reviewers from the Editorial Board, Review Panel or International Reference Panel". Have a look [here]

Wikipedia

It almost goes without saying that Wikipedia is the benchmark of web 2.0 and therefore something we need to be aware of. I particularly like the networked learning entry and aspire to rewrite this in the near future. See how that entry tips a nod towards web 2.0.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The Incentivising Wad

Returning again to the thorny issue of incentivising faculty to treat the online teaching & learning channel as personally rewarding & fulfilling. I was lying awake, after getting back from a week in Houston, remembering that the (global) partner institutions had mentioned the difficulty they have with faculty engaging with the instructional design process. Our place suffers from an apathy on the part of faculty to engage in a time consuming process that, in the end, is not financially rewarding for them. What with all the other draws on time, having to engage as SME in a protracted and interative design process creating online material for Exec Ed clients is not top of the list of priorities. At our place, time spent in online work is neither explicitly recognised nor rewarded.

It occured to me there were two problems and several opportunities facing the uptake of networked learning across the school. Firstly the problem of engaging our clients in consuming our online product (by product I mean the more just-in-time stuff like recorded & live Breeze sessions); and secondly, the problem of engaging our faculty to create, maintain and facilitate online product for that client - be that on a group or individual basis. Establishing or building motivation from the client is easier to understand if the online proposition includes direct access to a faculty member - either on a one-to-one coaching basis or group seminar basis. However, given the systemic problem of incentivisation in our place, the demand for such online product cannot be met. If traffic in one direction is a given (and bear in mind this is only a hypothesis), how do we drive faculty to the client in the online world?


What if we could devise some sort of auction system, that guaranteed financial or teaching credit reward to the faculty members meeting the online product need of clients? At this stage, not being explicit as to exactly what the product is, it is difficult to generalise as to how the such a system would work. But the amount of reward could be based on time spent on live seminar/meeting with a group, or time spent on a one-to-one session with a client. The ideal system would automatically capture time spent, and, based on some sort of calculation or weighting, divvy the reward accordingly.

When we are looking for differentiation in a crowded market (not just for B-school offerings but web2.0 services in general), and given the nature and limitations of our place, and given also that the issue of royalites has been raised, such a system, carefully investigated and designed, might offer a solution.

This is Del.icio.us

Hi - I'm a big fan of Del.icio.us. This free software is a collection of favourites - yours and everyone elses. Use Del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favourite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web
• Share favourites with friends, family and colleagues
• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favourite - they've already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.

The picture is a snapshot of my del.icio.us. What's the point of being restricted by your PC's browser favourites folder when you swap PCs regularly? Plus, quite a few of my new favourites have come from exploring the site.

Cheers. Tobes

Nuvvo - free LMS

I was talking to Gerry last week and he recommends this...

"Nuvvo is your way to teach on the web. Everyone knows a little bit about something, and this free, AJAX-enhanced eLearning web service is designed to bring out the teacher in all of us. Sign up and build a course in minutes; advertise your course on our eLearning Market to get the word out. Get teaching with Nuvvo, Web 2.0's answer to eLearning".[link]

Real-Time Collaboration

Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation Real-Time Collaboration Web Conference, San Francisco, CaliforniaMarch 8, 2005. [link]

Betty Collis

Betty Collis and Jef Moonen are specialists in learning involving information and communication technologies. They have a cult following with the learning designers that we met last week. There website is [here]

Flash Lite

Flash Lite has seen explosive adoption by OEMs, operators, and developers in Japan and Asia, and now it's quickly growing worldwide. Read a paper by Bill Perry [here]

This is now - 10 x 10

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.10x10 is designed to be simple and intuitive, so you should find it easy to use. When you open 10x10, you will see a grid of the top 100 world images that hour, ranked in order of importance, reading left to right, top to bottom. Along the right edge of the screen are listed the corresponding top 100 words, one for each image

86,800 most frequently used words...

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.

Swicki

Have you seen Swicki - look to the right of the page. It is a search engine that learns from the search behavior of your community. It is free. This may prove to be extremely valuable.

Frappr

Have a look at Frappr - another web 2.0 idea? You can create a map for your group and see where everybody is located. Take a look at Frappr

Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning

I have been doing a lot of work on systematic review / evidence-based practice and recently found this document which might be of interest: Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review

The report "critically reviews the literature on learning styles and examines in detail 13 of the most influential models. The report concludes that it matters fundamentally which instrument is chosen. The implications for teaching and learning in post-16 learning are serious and should be of concern to learners, teachers and trainers, managers, researchers and inspectors".

You can download a PDF here