Position: Writer
Location: Anywhere

Description: Are you involved in the world of educational technology? Studying or teaching online? Developing elearning strategies for your institution and putting together blended learning curricula? Or perhaps you’re training people on how to make the most of a particular technology and writing up online learning materials? And don’t think I’ve forgotten about all you learning management system/virtual learning environment administrators! If you fall into any or all of these categories, (or one that I’ve missed) and you’re interested in writing about your colorful experiences, then you’ve come to the right place!

Virtually Scholastic is opening its digital doors to guest contributors who know how to wrap timely messages in witty packages. This is a perfect opportunity for writers interested in expanding their readership and amplifying their virtual voice. It’s also a wonderful chance for those of you who’ve been thinking about starting a blog but who aren’t really sure whether to make the investment just yet. Virtually Scholastic has been around since 2008 and has cultivated a loyal following from places around the world like the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Italy, the Philippines, India, Spain, China and Russia.

If you know how to speak to a global community of practitioners (or aren’t exactly sure what that really means but would still like to have a go), then here are the steps to follow:

1. Read through some of the content at http://www.virtuallyscholastic.com to get a feel for the tone and the nature of the material.
2. Write what you propose to be the next post to be published on the site. Make it timely, fill it with interesting links, and remember to include a poignant message. Also remember to include one image along with source to accompany your writing.
3. Email your article to contact {at} virtuallyscholastic {dot} com along with a brief introduction to yourself and your work.

Guest contributors will be asked to write between one to two articles a month. Biographies of contributors will be featured on the site once three pieces have been published. Writers will also be expected to monitor discussions of their posts once comments start coming in, as well as to post occasional commentary to other VS posts.

I look forward to reading your work!

I’m involved in a great initiative that I wanted to share with VS readers. Core4Women is a collaborative online community hosted in Ning that brings together women who are open to sharing their experiences with online and distance learning with other women who might be considering jumping into the elearning pool themselves. As a mentor, I share my experiences and expertise with this community in order to broaden awareness of the nature and potential benefits of online learning.

One of the ways that mentors can support women in this community is by engaging in email exchanges and live text chats with community members, as well as contributing to discussions we have on the site. We also host informative web conferences via Elluminate during which mentors introduce topics of interest to the group and both mentors and the members seeking advice can come, watch, learn and contribute.

In the spirit of exploring creative ways of using technology to further engage us in our efforts to develop this community, I’ve created a couple VoiceThreads. If you’re interested in becoming part of this great initiative (with members now spanning the globe!), you’re welcome to sign up. And, if you’re really feeling adventurous, you’re more than welcome to add a thread to either of the discussions below!

I’ve started looking for a job this week, so I can tell you that the economy is much more of interest to me now than ever, particularly how it’s affecting higher education. I subscribe to a number of job search engines and associations that also syndicate new openings, so I’ve been observing the job market in California for a couple of months now. I’ve noticed very few instructional designer roles opening up, and even those that are published directly on university websites come with a disclaimer that although you can apply, they are currently under a hiring freeze so you might never hear back from them.

I’ve also noticed some phenomenal roles – policy makers, strategists and managers of institution-wide educational technology initiatives. These are generally posted by higher education institutions that have newly established ‘elearning units’ – hubs or centers of excellence with remits to expand hybrid and fully online course offerings for their universities. These jobs sound great, not only because of the stimulating challenges that lie waiting for the people who land the roles, but also because they show signs of greater understanding and openness on the side of the institutions who are ready, willing and eager to invest in educational technology initiatives.

So, now back to some thoughts on the economy…

Alan Tait wrote an interesting post on the EDEN President’s Blog about Scotland’s economy and how, through direct engagement with employers, higher education in the UK is able to design custom training for the workforce to ensure that the teaching is relevant, and that the industries feel the benefits. I wanted to include below a snippet of his impressions of the ways in which the oil and gas sectors view the relevance of education:

I was surprised by the almost total focus on the recruitment of the brightest and best of new graduates, and on coping with the difficulty in persuading new graduates that the Oil and Gas industries are attractive places to build a career. There was almost no focus from the industry representatives on the development of people in their existing workforce. My only contribution was to point out that if the competition for the brightest and best new graduates was already fierce this would only get worse because of the demographic down turn, in many developed countries at least, of this age cohort. This would mean development of the current workforce would become even more important than it was already, and that the emphasis on non-campus based forms of study that supported learning in and around the workplace rather just the campus would become all the more important.

Some industry giants must have heard Tait’s call because they’re already starting to do their part. Microsoft announced the launch of a new program in February designed to ‘provide up to 2 million people over the next three years with the technology training needed to succeed in the 21st-century economy’. A very important step considering that our focus can’t just be on current college students struggling to get heard in the blogosphere, and kids in K-12 who we’re trying to teach about technology at as early an age as we can. How about the current workforce – those still in it that is? Companies are not likely in the position to invest in on-the-job training, and employees are probably juggling with the new responsibilities faced by so many families who have had to transition from 2- to 1-income households. These types of new training initiatives only require time and determination from the life-long student…and the payoffs of self-empowerment would be priceless.

So, as the sun spills onto my carpet as I sit on my sofa (a change of pace from being proverbially chained to my desk – the magic of laptops!) and I can still take advantage of the quiet while the commuters are still on the roads returning home, I’ll post this message and get back to work. First point on the agenda: finish watching a webinar entitled ‘The Economy’s Impact on Higher Education’ – part of Educause’s monthly series discussing how the economic climate is impacting upon the education sector. Let’s hope they have some good news…

We’ve been practicing a few things in the world of educational technology. We’ve been identifying possible uses of technology in education. We’ve been creating research studies that test these uses in practical settings. We’ve raised money to conduct these studies and we’ve been publishing lots and lots of conclusions about what we think the outcomes of our experiments mean. Sometimes we even develop wonderful technology-enhanced tools like games and content management systems that support and even enhance learning but after the studies are done, and the funding is tapped out, where do these tools go? As this video discusses, lots of these tools get ‘parked’. They end up sitting on our office shelves, stored on our external hard drives or perhaps posted on our personal websites. But that’s as far as our contribution goes. Perhaps because there’s not enough money. Perhaps because there’s not enough time. Perhaps because…no one’s listening.

Where are the effective mechanisms that enable practitioners to store the vital information that we’re collecting about what works, what doesn’t, when what works actually works and when there’s no reason to even try?

Science published a special issue this January focusing specifically on education and technology in an effort to stimulate discussion on the subject. It brings to light the ever-growing importance of the long-term goal and continues to question the contribution that standardized tests make within our education system (the one in the US in this case). Progress in our understanding of how technology can work with us as we strive to become more educated, rather than work against us in a misconstrued attempt at updating today’s classrooms for the future is one of the major points addressed in this issue.

How do we share our great ideas? Pit stops are great, but one day soon, we’re going to run out of parking spots…and then what? Will we stop car production all together?

Whether you want your local students to have a way of meeting outside of the classroom, your distance learning students to remotely collaborate in their study groups or for you to conduct seminars online or have one-on-one conferences with your research students, the technology available to us today affords us with many free and easy solutions that connect people, and that allow for the sharing of videos and images as well as text and sound. The types of technologies focused on here are screen capture, screencast and screen share technologies along side video conferencing applications. These types of tools are more and more often being bundled together – so teach yourself what each technology does so that you can decide which ones are important to you.

In this post, I’m not going to go into great detail about the ways in which you could apply these technologies within an educational context. Instead, my intention is to build an evolving list of resources to which you can refer each time you find yourself looking for a new way to connect with your students (or to have them connect with each other).

Because the technologies below can seem similar to one another at first glance, it’s important to have as clear an idea as possible about what you want the technology to do for you. If you’re not sure exactly what it is you’re looking for, browse through the list and start to develop a familiarity with the capabilities of the tools. To help you get comfortable with their features, I’ve included links to demo videos and/or tutorials where they are available.

Just to clarify for those of you who might be unclear about the difference between Screen Capture vs. Screencast vs. Screen Share tools:

Creating a screen capture (a.k.a. ‘screenshot‘ or less eloquently as a ‘screen dump‘) is basically the process of taking a static (still) photo of your screen (great content to add to help documents and other instructional material that mix text with images). A screencast is a way for you to capture moving images (videos) of what you see on your screen and share them with other people so that they can see what you see (useful for demonstrating tools or for giving overviews of resources and course websites to distance learning/remotely located students). Participating in a screen share means to either have access to someone else’s computer or to give access to the other members of your group (lots of security issues arise in this scenario, but some people find the function useful).

Screen Capture / Screencast

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Read more about Skitch here

Demo Videos & Tutorials

Read more about sni.ps here

Sample Uses Videos

Video Conference / Screen Share

Demo Video

Demo Videos

Demo Video

Overview

FAQs

Demo Video

About

FAQs

Demo Video

Also see their education program

Tutorials

Demo Video

And remember, if you’re a MAC user, you can easily take quick pictures (screen shots) of any part of your screen by simply pressing COMMAND SHIFT 4 and highlighting the area you want to capture. A .png file of your selection appears neatly on your desktop.

Have I missed a tool you want to share with others? Add a comment and let me know!

Today’s post is about online study aids for students. For the most part, we’ll be looking at different variations of online flashcards. It’s up to you to determine whether they can add value to your teaching strategy. As a learning technologist, I would normally sit down with one or more instructors and discuss the nature of the course/module, how it fits in with the curriculum, the desired learning outcomes, the makeup of the student profile, the resources available within the classroom and throughout the term of the course, as well as how the teachers envision their instructional journey. Seeing as we don’t have that luxury here, I’ll do my best to provide you with an overview of some of the tools available to you – all free, all relatively user-friendly. One thing I will caution is that there is often a stigma associated with flashcards in which they are perceived as being useful only for elementary level learning, but with a bit of creativity and imagination, it’s possible to harness their power to aid in memory work and apply them beyond the basics of any subject – languages, geography, medicine, science and technology, history, etc.

Brainflips is the first tool on our list. The site has a great interface, each set of flashcards comes with a score board, timer, navigation panel and total number of cards in the deck, which makes it easy to see where you are in the testing process and how well you’re doing. You can study the materials in three different modes: introduction (question & answer side-by-side), traditional (question then answer), and response mode (manually enter answer). Learners can join groups which means that, for example, you can start a study group where you can create sets of decks of flashcards relevant to a specific class you’re teaching and have your students join your group. It gives you a sense of community and allows you to contextualize the learning in a clear place on the site. In terms of file formats, you can include audio, text, images and video into your flashcards. The search feature could be a bit more encompassing and there doesn’t seem to be much choice in how to filter and sort the results which makes it all the more important to know what you’re looking for.

FunnelBrain takes a very student-centric approach to learning. Based on the Leitner Method (common in the design of flashcard learning tools), the site emphasizes students working together to collaboratively build their knowledge and skills in common subject areas – a communities of practice approach for students. Mixing the well grounded learning theories with an innovative use of wikis and social software differentiates this from many of the other flashcard tools out there.

Although student teamwork is a great way to develop social as well as scholastic skill sets, how does the student know if they’re on the right path? Having said that, I understand how bringing teachers into the mix would significantly change the dynamic of a student-focused learning approached and these sorts of social dynamics are really important to consider in all technology enhanced educational settings. For example, there was a long-standing misconception prevalent in the educational community (I’m trying to be optimistic and use the past tense here…) that if students are using technologies so widely in their social lives, they will, of course, pick them up just as readily to support their learning. Then we found out that as soon as the context became more formal and people started watching (and assessing) what the students were doing with the technology, voluntary participation dwindled to a meager few. At best, you got a lot of lurkers and a very lonely eModerator creating monologues in the place of what was hoped would become enriching online discussions.

Collaborative online learning is brilliant – I’m a strong advocate of erasing borders, delimiting limitations and just getting on the with the work. Empowering students to take control of their learning is an initiative that, as far as I’m concerned, couldn’t be supported enough.

StudyStack has a nice feature of allowing users to rate collections of flashcards (a.k.a. ‘stacks’) using a star rating system. Users can sort search results by stack ratings, by date or by the description given to each set of flashcards. Some additional features include the ability to export content to mobile devices, sharing content through digg, twitter, etc. and there are even a few games mixed in for fun. (On a side note, if you’re looking for a way to create quizzes that students can complete on their mobile devices, you may want to consider Mobile Study.)

If I had known about StudyStack when I was using Ciao! to study Italian, I would have certainly saved myself some time writing out list after list of vocab and verb conjugations! Students are lucky these days!

Quizlet has a great demo video walking you through the key features of the service. What struck me is that it’s narrated by Andrew Sutherland who appears to be creating a quiz set of some French vocabulary for his high school French class – and he’s not the teacher! He’s the student! Why isn’t the teacher running the demo? Why aren’t teachers the ones advocating this tool? Why is a high school student showing teachers how to create learning resources? Or is this just a marketing strategy designed to make the tool more relatable to students?

In any case, this is a great site full of social networking features, very visual, very user-friendly, and it seems to have a lively community of members. If you get tired of flashcards, Quizlet can convert the information from the flashcards into online quizzes (written answer, matching, multiple choice and true/false formats are available) and if you’re really in the mood for some learning fun, you can play some online games to test your knowledge.

Because these tools are so similar in their functionality and rely so much on the creator of the study aids to suit the needs of the target students, much of the success of online flashcards depends on what you make of them. Remember that this is all based on your summative assessment strategy, so ask yourself a few questions when considering the use of online flashcards:

1. Do you as the instructor design the questions or do you have your students design the questions as part of the learning process?

2. Do you follow up and survey students’ scores, or do you mention the study aid once and hope they pick it up on their own?

3. Is there even a need to design your own cards considering the amount of content already available online?

4. Are you using textbooks that already make online study aids available to students? If not, do online flashcards work any better then end of chapter questions paired with a pencil and paper?

…and remember to have fun with it!

Wordle is getting a lot of hype in the educational blogosphere and also within my current study community, but I haven’t added it to my list of recommended techie tools until now because I just wasn’t totally convinced of its value.  It’s basically a tool that allows you to take a chunk of copied text (from an email, a document, etc., from a website url that has an atom feed, or even based on a user’s del.icio.us name) and paste it into a textbox. What comes out on the other end is a word cloud. Here’s an example below of a word cloud I created a second ago by pasting in the text from the ‘About‘ page of Wolfram Mathworld (a comprehensive learning object repository for all things math-related).

You can customise how the cloud looks, change colours and fonts and layouts, etc.

I suppose that it could be interesting to pick out key themes, terms, ideas, etc. out of selected works but how can it be usefully applied in an educational context?

Well, recently a colleague of mine from Dublin, Karl Duff, shared a really creative example with me of using Wordle within a foreign language context. The teacher creates a word cloud of an article or a short story. Students are then shown the cloud and the teacher explains the premise behind Wordle and the idea behind the bigger vs. the smaller words that are generated. Once students are clear on the concept of Wordle, they are asked to work in groups to create a short story based on what they think the Wordle cloud represents. This is, of course, done in the foreign language they are studying. The students are then asked to share their stories with the rest of the class and to discuss the similarities and differences between each group’s main ideas. Finally, the teacher reads out the article or short story that he/she originally selected to create the word cloud.

That’s the basic idea of the exercise. You could even go further and have the students create word clouds of their stories and compare with the original cloud. You could also add another level to the exercise and have the students individually write reflective essays about how their group’s story aligned with the key themes and ideas of the piece you selected. It all depends on how in depth you want to get.

To break down the design of the first part of this activity a bit more, I’ve adapted the Hybrid Learning Model (HLM) created by the Centre for Institutional E-Learning Services at the University of Ulster to outline the learning events that could take place in the example above using their mapping grid (pdf):

I would be very interested to hear how you’ve used Wordle to support your learning and teaching endeavors.

I just read the Key Findings (pdf) of The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007 and see some really big differences between my relationship with technology compared to that of these American undergraduates. I wanted to share some of my observations with you here.

And yes, I am conscious that I’m comparing my behavior (as a current postgraduate student of online and distance education with a UK university while living in the US) with that of undergraduate students in the US, but I think that this is still a really useful reflective exercise to see how I am positioned within this group of students. After all, as a learning technologist, I am indirectly affecting their learning experience by working directly with their teachers in developing teaching aids that integrate information technology to varying degrees. Essentially, what I’m say is that I feel it’s important to know your audience. If my job is to work with the teachers who educate undergraduates, then one way to ensure that I’m doing the best job possible is to know how my ICT recommendations relate to the end user.

So, now for some telling comparisons…

The above comparison explains a bit of my aversion to m-learning: I’m not really that interested in cell phones, and perhaps this makes it more difficult to get excited about mobile learning. On the other hand, my heavy use of electronic music/video devices perhaps also helps explain why I’m an advocate of podcasts and audiobooks as learning tools.

How much do those closest to us influence the way we view and use technology? Is developing ICT skills more of a social activity then a solitary act? Do we participate because we want to keep up? …to remain relevant in conversations? …because we see that others’ lives have been enriched? …or does like attract like? Do innovators all ride the techie wave while the laggards collectively dip in one toe at a time? Can an innovator convert a laggard?

Only 2.8 percent prefer courses that use technology exclusively?! I thought the majority would be in this grouping! I guess if I had to ask myself why I have this perception, it’s probably because I assume that since this generation grew up immersed in a technology-rich environment, they want that environment to extend naturally into their formal learning space.

I am one of those students who will opt for the 100% technology-based course almost every time! The study notes that 60% of those asked prefer a ‘moderate’ integration of technology into their courses. What does moderate mean to an undergraduate these days? Moderate to me would mean a standard course wiki, student blogs, podcasts, the occasional webcast (not necessarily live) and the obvious course management system. Is that moderate to you?

Perhaps a key to answering this last question reveals itself in the results from the open-ended questions where students indicated that IT becomes a barrier to learning when its proliferation creates a more complex learning environment. Could this mean that if they knew how to use the technology from the beginning of a course, it would no longer represent a barrier? Does this mean that secondary education isn’t preparing students enough for post-secondary learning? Or are students expected to learn about how to create a blog, contribute to a wiki and subscribe to a podcast in their own time?

I have to wonder whether evaluating potential candidates for learning technologist / instructional designer jobs in this way would help institutions and private companies better align competencies and interests with job goals and broader organizational targets.

As I’ve just started studying (online) again, my mind is tuning back into things it normally only focuses on when I’m in hard-core academic mode. This morning, for example, (well, actually, for the last two mornings) I’ve been reading through the introductory materials on both of my course websites, and I ended up going through a lot of information related to library resources and referencing tools. The most common bibliographic and bookmarking tools that we’re being recommended are RefWorks and Furl, respectively.

RefWorks is only available to us while we’re registered students. After that, unless we’re affiliated with an organization that pays for access OR unless we want to pay for an annual subscription ourselves, we loose all of our research collections at the end of the academic term. Basic translation: if you want to be able to access the information you collect and store using RefWorks over then next 6-8 months, this might not be your best choice.

Furl, on the other hand, is a social bookmarking service with many features, accessible from anywhere and free to all. Although they’re not direct substitutes, if I hadn’t already been hooked on Zotero when I first learned about Furl, I probably would have given Furl more of a chance.

Now we get to the reason for this post! I wanted to share a bibliographic management tool with you that I have found to be invaluable during my courses of study (and tangential resource endeavors). Zotero is a free, open source Firefox plugin that allows you to capture resources as you come across them and organise them into neat research collections. I find it thoroughly enjoyable and intuitive to use

Zotero allows me to make sense of the piles of information I collect each time I brave the plethora of resources available within just a few clicks of a mouse. To help bring my point home, imagine that if all the files and links I collected were stacks of random pieces of paper covering every square inch of my inevitably invisible imaginary desk, then Zotero would be like the magical fairy that instantly organises all the information into a beautifully systematic filing system that I structure and that is completely aligned with my thought processes. Essentially, it allows me to know where to find stuff when I need it – whether I’m on or off line.

It also lets me summarise reference collections almost instantly. Let me show you… I’ll share a report I generated from a collection of resources I built relating to online language learning. It generates the report in html format, so I just saved that page as a pdf file which is now available to you simply by clicking here.

Now that I’ve got you hooked ( ), let’s watch the video intro together (the video below opens in a new tab/window):

Zotero even has a social feature called Zotz that allows you to share your reference collections with communities. More info below:

Here’s an exhibit I just generated. The Zotz add-on still needs a little ironing out, but it’s an exciting new development of an already exceptionally functional information management tool.

There’s even a WordPress plugin available that helps Zotero better recognise the information in your blog entries which makes for more seamless referencing of this type of information as well. From the screenshot below, you can see the little additional icon that is displayed in your address bar once this plugin is activated. When you’re viewing a WordPress blog, once you click on this icon, a window pops up (as seen below) asking you which of the entries available on the page you’re on you would like to add to your Zotero collections.

Lots of other screencast tutorials are available for those interested in exploring the tool further.

I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have access to my Sprouts, and as a result, I’m not sure how much longer the Sprouts that I’ve published on this blog will be accessible. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough resources to recreate all of my Sprouts in alternative formats, but there is one in particular that I would like transfer here into this post so that the information can continue to help those interested. This way, we can also build upon it as a community and let it grow.

On 02 Jan 2009, I published a collection of links to various reusable learning object repositories that provide access to free electronic learning tools covering a broad scope of disciplines. I’ve transferred them below (listed in alphabetical order) in case that Sprout becomes inaccessible in the near future.

I wholeheartedly encourage teachers, tutors, teaching assistants, instructional designers, learning technologists, librarians, students (both formal and informal) and anyone else who’s interested to take a look at what’s out there. These are resources for all levels of learning (K-12 through to higher and continuing education) and the list even includes some resources for the mobile learner. They can help you create blended/e-learning lesson plans, stimulate discussion among peers about how to begin integrating technology into your curricula and support your students in the development of connected learning strategies. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are accessible resources out there, produced by people with subject expertise and a genuine intention to share information with the world. Take advantage!

Please note, all links below will open in new windows/tabs.