The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.
I’ve created a new del.icio.us tag and am inviting you all to use it. The Teaching with Web 2.0 tag, or tww2.0, is for all resources that…well…are useful for teaching with Web 2.0. I’ve refrained from calling it e-Learning 2.0 because it’s not clear to me that using Web 2.0 tools necessarily means that you’re doing anything revolutionary in your pedagogy.
Anyway, I’d love to see some resources accumulate, so please do use the tag liberally.
I’m putting together a “Teaching with Web 2.0” talk and cookbook and I’m looking for tutorials on how to use del.icio.us–preferably something basic that can walk technology-timid faculty through the steps of setting up an account, installing the bookmarklet, tagging pages, finding pages tagged by other people, etc. Anybody know of anything like that? The help pages on del.icio.us itself are OK, but I’m looking for something more like a set of tutorials.
I have a new column up on e-Learn called There’s No Such Thing as a Learning Object. This has been a long time coming; I was an early advocate for learning objects–and still am an advocate, in some ways. But I think that the term has gotten so badly abused that we need to do something about it.
tags: learning objects
Lately I find myself experimenting with lots of different Firefox extensions and thinking about the browser itself as a learning environment. The number of interesting ways that you can extend the platform is just staggering. When you add to that the fact that Firefox is cross-platform and that you can now run it off a USB key drive, it starts to look more and more to me like a core piece of e-Learning technology. Without even getting into the interesting astand-alone applications built on top of the Firefox technology platform, e.g., eXe or Flock, I thought it might be useful to list a small handful of extensions that have applications in teaching and learning contexts. Feel free to add your favorites to the list. (more…)
D’Arcy has a very useful wiki page up outlining all the various dimensions of the huge, amorphous blog sometimes known as “ePortfolios.” This is why there will never be just one class of ePortfolio apps .
I’ll be participating in the Association for Advancement of Computing in Education‘s Ed-Media 2006 Conference on James Dalziel‘s panel as part of the Learning Management Systems Symposium. Here’s the description of the panel:
It only took a decade for the LMS to go from being a good idea to being a software system used by most universities. But does the LMS have a certain future? Growing challenges may soon disrupt the existing marketplace � these include:
- Frustration among many leading LMS users with the slow pace of pedagogical innovation by LMS vendors;
- Ongoing difficulties in integrating other products into LMS platforms;
- The rise of other major learning technologies such as Repositories, Learning Content Management systems, Assessment systems, Virtual Classrooms and Learning Design systems;
- New approaches to building software based on a “Service Oriented Architecture/Approach” (SOA); and
- The increasing impact of open source software, and open standards.
Perhaps the greatest challenge may arise from a fundamental shift away from LMSs as the central “platform” for learning. An alternative vision for Learning Platforms is growing around the concept of an overarching portal system that integrates various specialist learning systems (such as repositories, learning design, etc) into a composite learning systems framework (sometimes called a Learning Management Operating System � LMOS). This session will explore current and future challenges for LMSs, how LMSs may respond, and alternative visions for Learning Platforms.
I’ll be able to post the transcript of my paper after the proceedings are published.
