eLearning at New College

It’s time for change in the education system, particularly in the way we assess our learners, according to the big three. From Futurelab’s Flux blog.

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

Haven’t posted here since April but with a few new people on board the eLearning team at New College it would be good to get some activity going again. A reminder that the purpose of this blog is to keep everyone up to date on new developments in eLearning including what we’re up to as a team. So post your links, tips, reflections, recommendations and comments and enjoy!

An enjoyable 45 minute presentation by Alvin Trusty on (a) avoiding breaking the law when constructing slides and (b) good practice design principles:

How to create a great powerpoint without breaking the law.

Don’t forget to check out his del-icio-us links.

Thanks to Josie Fraser via Jaiku for the heads-up:

Keeping Students Safe Online

At the same website there are notes from a previous webinar on using wikis in libraries.

I asked one of my second year Sociology classes a few questions the other day regarding their use of technology. For what its worth (obviously very unscientific!) here is what they said:

(a) Every single student had an mp3 player of some kind. Some variation of an iPod was most popular, other brands included Creative Zen and Samsung. Interestingly the vast majority prefer listening to content on a dedicated mp3 player rather than their phones.

(b) About half the class had downloaded and listened to a podcast via iTunes. The most popular genres were comedy and music. Nobody had listened to any specific educational content via podcasts.

(c) About 90% of the class used a social networking website ‘fairly regularly’, the three most popular being Facebook, MySpace and Bebo (some students use more than one). They often use these sites plus Instant Chat applications such as MSN or Yahoo for helping each other out with college-related work.

Obviously completely unrepresentative but I wonder to what extent this kind of data is replicated across other groups of students in the college?

Not sure about the quality of the narration and sound but there is an interesting little screencast over on TeacherTube about the 10 steps it takes to build a professional learning community. One thing I definitely agreed with is the need for a vision statement and clear goals (with the learner centre stage). I wonder whether the eLearning team could come up with a vision statement?

As well as being a very interesting – and 50-slide long! – lecture on the role of digital technologies in education, Laurillard’s inaugural lecture for the London Knowledge Lab is a great example of how to use Powerpoint (or Apple’s equivalent software ‘Keynote’) to create great-looking slides without using endless lists of bullet points. Lecturers (and managers!) take note!

For those still a little unsure about what eLearning entails, there is a short and readable introduction by Ken Allan over on the Futurelab website.

A couple of comments. Firstly, according to Allan ’static’ resources such as Word or pdf files hosted on a VLE do not count as eLearning since they do not involve interactivity. Secondly Allan acknowledges the fact that a ‘blended’ approach to learning is probably the best approach, meeting learners’ needs through a mixture of digital and print-based resources.

Any comments?

Another excellent paperworks video from the folks at commoncraft, this time a plain english guide to blogs. (I’ll try and embed it once I’ve worked out how to embed Flash video in a post! Justin – help! Seem to have it working now.