e-learning

A Question Posed…

Posted on by Jon K.

I was thinking on the walk home last night about how I could change my Searching The Internet Effectively course so that it might have more impact. Currently it’s a fairly straight forward deal – lecture for one hour, then give students class time to complete an exercise which I will help them with over the next two hours.  Most students choose to leave after the lecture and complete the work at home, or another place. The last question on the last exercise asks students to factor in everything they know at this point, and search for something that is related to searching and outline this in a word document with evaluations of the websites they’ve found – sort of an annotated bibliography. Then there’s an exam, which is mandatory.

This course is far too straight forward for my tastes. I think I’d like to keep the weekly worksheets as an exercise, but make the markable stuff in a wiki. I was thinking each student wiki account would also allow the student to journal their searching terms, perhaps on an account info page that the student would cut and paste search terms into so that I was sure of the technical aspect of searching was covered.

Anyone out there mark contributions to a wiki other than this one? How would such a beast exist? I’d break it down to deal with content (is it a good website?), form (how it was discovered),  editing (did they revisit and revise content?)… Frankly I’m a pessimist, and what happens if the students reject this sort of (in my institution anyway) radical idea?

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Flex(ing) My Head?

Posted on by Jon K.

Even though I’ve always been told that explaining the joke is bad form, it’s never stopped me from doing that. This one was too good to pass up – the classic Flex Your Head compilation which documented the DC hardcore punk scene in 1982, combined with Adobe’s Flex product and my head banging on the wall trying to use it.

I got a chuckle out of it.

My experience with Flex has been relatively painless so far, the developer network and the sharing that goes on is pretty impressive. Lots of people are very accomodating, offering their code and techniques. I have a bit of history with Action Script, which is the programming language attached to Flash, which also works with Flex. It’s very similar to C, and bears a resemblance to Lingo which was used by Macromedia in their Director project.

Now getting this to do what I want it to is a different story. I was attempting to do a timeline, where a central node was scrolling along from left to right, and highlighting and creating new connections (and repeated ones) to new people in my network. It’s been a while, so maybe it’s just the rust on my brain. I’m going to dedicate the better part of tonight to get it nailed down, maybe it’ll be a simplified visualization with some sort of text? I did find a great example of how to do the network mapping side of things. I’m not sure I can get the rest of my ideas to work though, with such a short deadline.

Enough talk more action!

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Thinkature

Posted on by Jon K.

Hmmm, dunno what I think about Thinkature, but it seems like a decent little tool. I was looking for a free web based collaborative tool for my Searching The Internet class – came across this. We don’t have elluminate available college-wide (although I would like to use elluminate sessions in my Distance Ed offering of the same course). The idea that I wanted to do is a whiteboard session where people add different ideas as to what web searching means to them – it bombed in class. Terribly. It resorted to me talking and drawing answers out of people. I think one of the reasons it failed was that it just wasn’t something people expected. They expect to come in use the computers and leave. Asking people to get up in front of the class and express how they feel about searching doesn’t work for them. So, maybe using a website will be more in line with what they expect, but get what I want out of them.

As an aside, the whole webmaster certificate course is very silo’d. I don’t know what other people are teaching, I just know my areas. So if I teach something, it’s quite possible it’s been taught before. In another class. It’s also very geared to the web individual. The part that’s missing is that web designers rarely act alone. They interact with clients, other designers to figure out problems, other programmers to deal with database code or scripting and have a brief idea of what consumers want out of websites.

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E-Learning Is Not E-Teaching

Posted on by Jon K.

I woke up this morning with a start. It was about 6:30 AM, which meant it was early enough to be almost light out, but late enough that going back to sleep was an exercise in futility. I was having a dream that I was giving a speech in front of my colleagues, the faculty of the Language Studies department. After being introduced by the dean of the department, I gave my “farewell” speech. Or at least it felt like it. Here’s what I recall of it:

I hope that my absence will not be seen as a reason to abandon e-learning, but a platform for you to take the next step. I have shown you different tools to use, now you have to use them without my aid. The shift from e-teaching to e-learning has already happened. E-learning is not e-teaching. You are no longer in control of what happens in the classroom. The students are in control. You are a guide, not a director. Show people how to learn, don’t teach them.

Clearly, all this theory work in the CCK08 course and the facilitation course are starting to sink in. Even in my unconscious state. I think though my subconscious though brought forth an interesting idea. E-learning is not e-teaching. So many people use e-learning as an e-teaching place. They use the new technology with the old rules because they don’t see the distinction, even though it’s right there on the name. E-learning. Learning, not teaching. Subtle difference I suppose, but it’s there. It’s spelling out the paradigm shift that’s already shifted (and I’d say that we’re in the process of shifting again, beyond a learner centred focus).

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