Rethinking Education

Michael Wesch has been very influential in framing the debate around e-learning. I first came across him via his video The Machine is Using Us, published in March 2007, and I still use it as an introduction to my Level 1 lab course on Practical Internet Technology. It has 1,358,994 views on YouTube. His second, A Vision of Students Today (published October 2007), has had 4,112,629 views, is shown at virtually all e-learning conferences and is cited by all e-learning bloggers at some point.

Now his third magnum opus, Rethinking Education has just been posted. Will it be a focus of debate for the next three years?



Thanks to Rita Kopp (@welshcloggy) for the link.

Play Learning Tool Bingo!

Jane Hart's Centre for Performance and Learning Technologies (C4PLT) has just published the final list of the top 100 learning tools for 2010. The list is nicely presented on Slideshare (up two places to number 5 from last year's number 7) and I've embedded it here.

Top100 Tools for Learning 2010

View more presentations from Jane Hart.

Having gone through the list, and finding that I was using quite a few of the tools listed, I thought that it would be fun to turn the list into a game of "learning tool bingo" and see who gets closest to a full house.

How to Play
Here's the Bingo form on Google Docs Go through Jane's presentation and if you are using or have used the tool, mark it off on the form. The results in text form are here and as here as a graphical summary.

How to Use Social Software in Higher Education

As noted in Alan Cann’s Science of the Invisible, EU funded funded project iCamp has published a handbook on “How to Use Social Software in Higher Education” and it’ll be on my “to read list” over the Easter break. The iCamp site itself looks to be worth monitoring.

We are not alone…

Today I typed learninglab into my web browser’s address bar with the intention of visiting Swansea University's hottest  web destination. And I was intrigued by how many sites Google and Live Search threw up as suggested destinations. Quite a few are apparently concerned with the same things that Swansea’s Learning Lab is and several might merit further investigation. Are there any intrepid explorers in the Learning Lab who want to put on their hiking boots and report back on any treasures that they find?

'What would you not want to see in any future education system?'

'What would you not want to see in any future education system?'. Through Million Futures Future Lab want to collect a broad range of views - negative as well as positive - about future education systems. These views will help to inform the Beyond Current Horizons project.
Go to Million Futures website...

Blackboard - the future

Blackboard inc have released some video presentations about their Project NG (Next Generation) this is the hybred product that includes the final best of breed integration of WebCT and Blackboard into a single product. The presentation is not yet complete and more will be released as it becomes available. Nor is there as yet any formal release date - though at the BBWorld Europe confernence in Manchester Michael Chasen CEO suggested that it would in fact be version 10 sometime around end of 2009 early 2010 with some of the changes hitting version 9 early in 2009.

If you can bear the american hype as the presenter gets "really excited..." about every feature, it is worth a look as it illustrates the new drag and drop structure along with the context sensitive menus for course editing. You can view the presentation here it is an improvement on

Going Global, Going Public

Dean Shareski an Educational Technologist and advocate of the educational benefits of on-line sharing (See: Lesson #1: Share), has posted another pod- and slide cast in which he discusses some issues around being on-line, dispels some myths and considers the advantages of sharing. The presentation has a primary school perspective, but many of the pros-and-cons of educational web use which apply to primary and junior school children also apply to University students, so Dean's thoughts are no-less instructive and thought provoking for that.

The big take away for me, and the reason for this post, is that the traces you leave in the web when you start to develop an on-line presence don't vanish very quickly! Dean's suggestion in slide 8 that you should Google yourself is really instructive! This is what Google [thinks it] knows about me ... what does it know about you?

The original source of the embedded presentation is Podcast #40 of Thoughts from an EdTech. More about "Going Global, Going Public", posted with vodpod.

The sweet spot in education

Martin Weller (from the Open University) has republished his presentation from a JISC Emerge conference on SlideShare and released it in a blog post entitled "Finding the Sweetspot Between Web 2 and Education". The Sweet spot may actually be somewhere between formal instititutional e-learning systems and informal social networks and may have a lot to do with peer support and the gift economy.

Examples given include

• two OU Facebook Applications (the first Course Profiles builds communities around OU courses, and the second, My OU Story, is aimed at building peer support networks for students)
• SocialLearn a social network for the Open University and a platform for developing new types and models of learning
• The EduPunk movement, and the video gifted to the community by Martin and mentioned in this august blog here.
  
• and Twitter

A very interesting presentation with lots of food for thought!

more about "The sweet spot in education", posted with vodpod

Lesson #1 Share

I discovered this presentation through the Google Reader suggestions feature. This had noted that I read a few educational blogs and pointed me to one I wasn't reading: Ideas and Thoughts by Dean Shareski. Here I found this nice shortish presentation on Sharing that Dean has shared via SlideShare. I was aware of some of the methods of sharing described, but I also discovered quite a few new ones. Well worth sharing, I thought, so why not share it with the Learning Lab Community ... watch it during your coffee break and enjoy!

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