e-learning
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The online pivot – student perspective
I posted a piece yesterday on what it will mean for educators and institutions to shift online as a result of COVID-19. And most of the articles and advice out there is aimed at educators, but we should bear in mind that it is an unfamiliar experience for many students too. One of the functions of face to face education is that it does a lot of the organising for a student: here is a timetable, here are locations to be in, here is where the resources can be found, etc. The physical structure of a campus is also a time and planning structure. When you move online (depending on…
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The COVID-19 online pivot
The outbreak of COVID-19 has seen many universities closing campuses and shifting learning online. It’s unprecedented and suddenly puts ed tech front and centre in a way it hasn’t been before. For those of us who have been doing online learning or distance ed for a while it can seem a bit irritating to have been seen as second class for so long and then suddenly deemed worthy of interest. So I tweeted over the weekend: It’s interesting seeing all the unis that disparaged distance ed as not proper suddenly being converted to the benefits of online education — Martin Weller (@mweller) March 7, 2020 It was kinda snarky, but…
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Connectivism and scale
via GIPHY In his recent post criticising the Creative Commons Certificate, which I won’t comment on, Stephen Downes repeats a claim he has made before about the scalability of the connectivist approach, stating: One of the major objectives of our original MOOCs was to enable MOOC participants to create interaction and facilitation for each other. This is because there is no system in the world where a 1:30 instructor:student ratio will scale to provide open and equitable access. In my view, this model worked very well. I’ll preface what I’m going to say with stating that I’m a big fan of connectivism for two reasons: it is an example of…
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25 Years of EdTech – 2001: e-learning standards
This post effectively brings together two preceding ones, namely elearning and learning objects. By the turn of the millennium, elearning was everywhere. The internet was no longer dismissed as a fad, and you could make yourself a guru by spouting a few homilies about the death of distance and the like. After the initial flurry of activity, typified by a wild west approach to creating your own website (I’d like to say that academics have a flair for website design, but, erm, we really don’t), there was a necessary, if slightly less fun, concentration of efforts. This meant developing platforms which could be easily set up and run elearning (oh,…
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25 years of EdTech – 1997: Constructivism
In 1997 web based learning was getting a lot of traction, and with it people began to look around for new models of teaching. So for 1997 I’m not focusing on a technology, but rather an educational theory because there’s education in educational technology after all. Constructivism was by no means new, dating back to Piaget, Vygostky and Bruner. The principal concept of constructivism is that learners construct their own knowledge, based on their experience and relationship with concepts. It’s a (sometimes vague) learning theory rather than a specific pedagogy, so how it is implemented varies. It was often put into practice by active learning, or discovery based approaches. The…
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DashLearn – the Amazon Dash for Learning
[Following on from my piece on Pokemon Go, this week’s thing is Amazon Dash, so getting in with a “for learning” piece before anyone else. And in case it isn’t sledgehammer obvious, it’s parody] “This month has seen the launch of Amazon Dash – easy buttons to order everyday items that has completely revolutionised shopping. Amazon understand that we live n a modern, high tempo world and need to take instant action. Sadly, this attitude has not permeated the ivory towers of education, where 100% of lectures take place exactly as they did 200 years ago. While the internet disrupts every aspect of society, it is impossible to find a…
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Just the twenty years
This month marks twenty years since I started at the OU. In five years time I get a clock. I know you’re thinking ‘he doesn’t look a day over 30’ – oh, you’re not. Anyway, time for some reflection, and as I said few posts back, I think those of us in ed tech in particular (but all of society to a large extent) have been through such rapid change that we take it for granted now. So here is a brief ‘my life in ed tech over the past twenty years review’. When I joined the OU I said at the interview “I’m interested in this internet thing. Have…
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Waiting for the great leap forward
Now that it’s 2015 (it is, check your phone!), it’s interesting to think about changes in ed tech over the past five years. People often use the 5 year timespan to make predictions, so it’s a convenient chunk of time. The major advance in technology in society, which has then impacted upon education, has been in mobile computing I’d suggest. We’ve also had MOOCs and Learning Analytics in that time as the main movements within education technology. I would suggest though that it’s been a fairly stagnant five years. More a case of stuff developing gradually rather than big revolutions. Consider the changes from 2000-2005: we had 14k modems, were…
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What can I take away from DS106?
I think we can say that Jim Groom's Digital Storytelling course has been very successful in generating an online buzz, and as a model of what you can do with an open, online course. The development of DS106Radio has been something to behold as it has taken on a life of its own. As D'Arcy has commented most of the technology for this has been around for a while, but it all seemed to coalesce into something quite magical. Jim has some thoughts on DS106 radio here, arguing that it "provides is a model for yet another platform for sharing, creating, and trying to foster conversation." I've been thinking about…
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The Lamb Formula = Good enough?
In my previous presentation one of the slides I didn't get to displayed the following Venn Diagram for what I term 'The Lamb formula' (Image created by crappygraphs) This is from Brian Lamb, who borrows the title from Errol Morris' documentary, to describe the kind of technology he likes, and thinks is useful. My take on these three elements (which may be different to Brian's) as they pertain to education is: Fast – Technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. You don't need to go on a training course to use it, or put in a request to central IT services to set it up. This…
