eLearning at New College

Its hard to keep track of the multitude of tools now available online for educators. The Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki has links to some of the more common tools for creating a wide range of educational tasks, so check it out if you don’t know your mashups from your mindmaps or your screencasts from your social bookmarks. Its a fantastic resource and seems to be updated regularly. If you know of any tools you think are missing send the author some suggestions on their feedback page.

The m-Learning World blog has a good run-down of the steps needed to use your iPod/iPod Touch/iPhone for showing a slide presentation on a TV. The first part talks about the various settings and iPod models this will work on. The next part will show how to get Powerpoint slides onto your iPod. Its a great solution if you don’t want to lug around a laptop and you have the right cables to attach to a TV in the classroom or elsewhere.

750,000 to give away to teachers in all education sectors including FE. The memory sticks include learning resources with an ‘interface’ that automatically pops up when the stick is plugged in, however. May not be to everyone’s liking but hey its free.

More details here

Hat tip to Paul Flynn from Stockton College.

I have finished the first in what I hope to be a series of ‘walk-throughs’ for using new technologies in creative ways in our teaching and learning. As many of the creative tools I use are on the Apple Mac platform I thought I would start by introducing users new to Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) to 10 basic tips. I also hope to create a series of screencasts to accompany the walk-throughs as well as training sessions for those interested in learning more about these tools. Look out for upcoming walk-throughs on podcasting with Garageband 08 and an introduction to blogging using Edublogs.

To download this walkthrough as a pdf file click on the following link:

10basicMactipsv4.pdf

You can also access an online version of the document here

Following this week’s mLearn 2008 conference I’ve heard a few colleagues question what they consider to be an overly ‘academic’ focus on new technologies within education. There is a good post by Bob Harrison on Futurelab’s blog Flux which addresses this issue by referencing both Marc Prensky’s talk at mLearn and Diana Laurillard’s keynote lecture.

Although there are undoubtedly some academics who are making a career from over-theorising eLearning rather than ‘getting their hands dirty’ with new technologies, I tend to agree with Laurillard that it is the pedagogy (thinking about the practice of teaching and learning) that should drive the technology and not the other way around. Technological determinism – the idea that technological developments are (and should be) the main drivers for social and institutional changes – may no longer be the academic flavour of the month, but it is still popular in some educational settings and establishments. The problem with this view is that it encourages us to attribute a mysterious and autonomous power to educational technology in the process of which the complexities of the learning experience itself is largely forgotten. So rather than uncritically celebrate the latest and greatest technologies in education let’s start with what is genuinely innovative, collaborative and creative about teaching and learning in F.E and then start to look for new technologies that can enable these new learning experiences.

Stephanie and I attended a workshop yesterday at mLearn 2008 run by Palitha Edirisingha (author of this book) on Podcasting and Learning. The focus was both practical (in groups we planned and made a 3-min podcast using Audacity) and theoretical (we discussed a 10-factor framework for considering how podcasts can fit into teaching and learning). Most of the data Palitha used was based upon the UK HEA-funded IMPALA project (Informal Mobile Podcasting and Learning Adaptation) which took place across seven universities and involved 500 students.

A couple of things that I took away from the workshop which I thought were really useful (apart from a free copy each of the book which came out of the project – see myself or Stephanie if you’d like to borrow a copy):

1. To do properly podcasts take a lot of planning. Even short audio podcasts require a clear beginning, middle and end and need to be planned within an overall scheme of work or course overview.

2. Podcasting is perhaps best thought of as enabling new and creative ways of learning rather than reinforcing traditional ways of learning. I suppose there is still a place for the video podcast of the lecturer ‘lecturing’ to her/his students, but we ought to think of how podcasts can enable collaborative, reflective and active learning by students.

I will be shamelessly stealing some of Palitha’s ideas in the podcasting basics workshops that I will be running over the next few weeks (email Eileen Treanor to book yourself on these sessions which are limited to 10 people at a time).

Edublogs are in the process of moving their hosting services at the moment so you may experience some down-time and slow loading times with this and other edublogs blogs. More details here.

Reading an interesting article at the moment by Allison Druin (University of Maryland) on the role that young people can play in the design of new educational technologies. Often when we design learning environments we assume that the “teacher knows best” and our involvement of learners is, at best, tokenistic. Druin argues there are major benefits in including young people as design partners when designing technological tools for learning:

We cannot expect very young people to program as well as computer scientists. We cannot expect them to know what educational goals need to be covered in a school curriculum as well as a teacher does. But we can expect children to tell us what excites and bores them, what helps them learn, and what can be used in their homes and schools. We can expect children to be creative, honest collaborators. Children can also help us adults to think beyond the traditional needs of the workplace. Instead of productivity, efficiency or cost saving, they can help adults think about tools that can let people laugh, enable creativity and support collaborative learning.

Druin’s argument surely has implications for how we design our VLE’s home page and other pages. How do we involve learners in creating an exciting and collaborative learning environment that is centred on their needs and requirements rather than us as teachers?

The role of children in the design of new technology by Allison Druin Behaviour and Information Technology, 2002, vol. 21, no. 1, 1-25

Stephanie Warren and I are off to Telford tomorrow for MLearn 2008. I’m just going for the day and will be attending a workshop run by Palitha Edirisingha from the University of Leicester on how student learning can be enhanced by the use of podcasting. Stephanie, brave soul that she is, is presenting a paper on the Wednesday on the MyPodcast project. On Tuesday she’ll be attending a pre-conference workshop ‘Evaluating Mobile Learning: Approaches, Methods and Tools.’ Watch this space for a report on our trip.