Faculty Observations
As an LMS support person for faculty (and the occasional student) I've worked at a three year community college and now a university. I've delivered training at both institutions, and had the opportunity to talk to a lot of faculty. Here's some interesting observations:
Most faculty have some experience with an LMS by now. They may not know it's an LMS, but they've had some experience somwhere along the line.
Even those who are most resistant to the idea that they should teach somewhat online recognize the power of sharing their content (whether it be Word docs or PowerPoints or something more web friendly). Many are happy to stop here.
Very few faculty members at either institution are making use of the LMS's capabilities fully. Most are using it as a sharing platform to augment what they do face to face.
Very few faculty feel that sharing their stuff with their students is a bad thing for class attendance. Glad that myth is over.
Faculty at the university are more comfortable and familiar with LMS's and technology in general, when compared with faculty at the college. This might be due to the nature of college courses and diplomas being geared towards tradespeople, which have been stereotyped as lower class jobs. I've seen the literacy rates of incoming students first hand, and they've decreased significantly over the last decade. The same is true for university, but university has been traditionally for the upper and middle class. It's interesting to note how clear the lines are drawn once you've worked at both places.
The Learning Self
This post is a little off-topic but relates to learning, and more specifically, my own learning online. In a previous lifetime (about 15 years ago now) I was going to school to be an audio engineer - and we learned about electronics as part of the core courses to graduate. It's been handy to know about circuits and electrical theory, but I haven't used it in many years so it's not on top of my mind. I've been thinking about building guitar effects pedals, so I've been prowling around the web looking for lessons on soldering (my weakness), schematics and whatever else I could find. And I've found a lot! Tons of message boards, plenty of PDF schematics, lots of discussion around noise-making, adapting circuits, bent circuits and many beginners tutorials. In fact, had I known back then what I know now, I might not have given it up to do something else.
What this has to do with learning is simple, in my case, I'm motivated to learn and will spend most of my time doing so if given the freedom to do so. Much like learning in informal settings - motivated learners taking on tasks that are directed to solving their problems.
Time’s 50 Best Websites
It's interesting to surf through the 50 best websites according to Time, not just because it's another view about what's good in the web, but it's also interesting to see how they pared untold billions of sites and pages down to 50. It's like saying name your top 3 punk 7" EPs - there's thousands of possible choices and lots of opinions, but narrowing it down is awful tough.
So looking at the sites Time likes for education there's two must-haves and pretty easy choices (Ted and MIT OpenCourseware). Two other choices, Livemocha makes sense, and is a great use of the web technology, and really accentuates informal learning. As does Chegg, the textbook rental service, who accentuate the social aspect of learning.
The last one, I went "huh". Read Print is a service that catalogs public domain books - which seem to be a lot of the same old available books in the public domain, which are available from iTunes, Amazon and a few other places where one might look for books before Read Print. Where Read Print gets it is the selection of quotes from author's works, where it's wrong is that these are HTML files with the companies advertising, which is also text links, at the top of the screen. Even if I wanted to read this on my Kindle or iPad (neither of which I own, but maybe I'd want to read it on my iPod Touch?) it would blow. I don't want to bash this site too much because I love the idea, but the question isn't top 50 website ideas you love. Is this among the best websites for education? I think Khan Academy or even Teacher Tube would be an interesting choice that would have stuff to write about rather than this ode to dead trees. I'd be interested in the number of texts that are available in the public domain. I'm sure that 1984 and Animal Farm are fairly common texts, and are apparently in the public domain, or maybe they aren't.
Monetizing e-Learning
Odijoo is an attempt to provide a free e-learning development platform to deliver web-based learning. The instructor could then assign a monetary value for access to the course, or can give it away. The question I have is that with Open CourseWare courses cropping up from real educational institutions, will anyone pay for content from a private company? On top of that, people generally want a piece of paper or some accreditation for their work. Odijoo doesn't provide this. I could see if Microsoft used the service to provide Microsoft certification, although chances are Microsoft would do that from their own site. I like the model for informal learning although when you formalize learning, it can get, well, weird.