The UK's Computing newspaper notes that:

"a survey of more than 100 HR directors and training managers in late February, online learning consultancy and publisher Echelon found that interactive multimedia training has overtaken both books and video as the preferred way of gaining new skills."

Also notable:

"...text-based online learning came out on top. This fits one of the survey's other findings: respondents cited 'depth of content' and 'speed of access' - two key features of searchable, text-based systems - as their most important considerations when looking to solve a problem or acquire knowledge and skills." [e-Learning Eclectic]

1:57:26 PM    

Sometime recently we passed another milestone in the 10th year of continuous web presence by our Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction.

In Spring of 1994 we were doing support for faculty at South Mountain Community College in helping them get started with a local "center" for teaching, learning, and technology-- we had convinced the college to donate space for an "Educational Technology Center", a small room in the back of the library (now realized as robust, staffed, and established Teaching and Learning Center located in the Computer Commons).

We dragged down a few computers, publicized some workshops in the Spring of 2004. most of them lightly attended. I had been using HTML for a few months, and thought it could be a great way for faculty to create hyperlinked multimedia content, especially since it could be tossed on a little old floppy disk. Se in creating a workshop on basic HTML, it made sense to actually do it as a web site....

Wow, look at that fancy logo- the little Mosaic browser logo, defty done drop shadows (the old way in channels in PhotoShop 3.0)... Anyhow, as you can see in a later snapshot of this stone age web page, we ran through 8 lessons of basic HTML headers, paragraphs, lists, images, hyperlinks-- and this has all nicely evolved into the current version with now 30 lessons (which is overdue for an overhaul into teaching CSS, some day....) and translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and even Icelandic.

We've gotten lots of mileage from the "Volcano" tutorial ( the HTML lessons are a building series of tasks culminating in a web site about Volcanoes), more than 3400 email messages of feedback, and a few arrive almost every day, form just about every internet domain you can think of.

Ten years and still clickin'

1:56:23 PM    

An Intro to Online Training Games: "In training, games are commonly used to supplement traditional lecture-based or online delivery of information. Marc Prensky, explains, “In most cases, digital game-based learning is not designed to do an entire training or teaching job alone.” The role of games is primarily to reinforce the understanding of presented material and to add variety in training."
Nice list of game templates and development tools provided at the end of the article.

1:51:43 PM    

It seems like the idea of using RSS as a means to syndicate new items in learning object repositories is steadily catching on. The page I've set up to aggregate a number of these feeds now has three more, two of them thanks to Ian Winship from Northumbria University.

The new feeds are:
- latest additions to the EEVL repository, a UK-based guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing
- latest additions to the Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre for Economics' collection of resources
- a 'by subject' feed from Chalkface, a UK-based publisher of K-12 online courses and photocopy-master lesson plans

11:38:37 AM    

http://www.lsal.cmu.edu/lsal/expertise/
papers/notes/lotec05052003/lotec05052003.html

This paper, from Dan Rehak and others at the renowned Learning Systems Architecture Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University (which now has a new RSS feed), asks how authors actually create learning objects, and whether the current tools are supporting these actual processes or instead getting in the way. To investigate this they take the sensible step back from the technology and look at a number of low or no tech paper-based techniques for developing learning objects, with the "objective [is] to help create learning, and hide technology and standards" and thus "understand how learning technology standards can be applied in the creation of learning objects and content."

You can draw your own conclusions - I think the process they outline is a useful one for tool builders to go through if they want to build tools that support the way people actually work. But my cursory reading didn't reveal any huge lessons learnt from the paper-based modelling and many of the criticisms levelled at the one example tool (ReLoad) they cite could seemingly be levelled at the paper-based model as well (e.g. use of jargon for one). - SWL

11:35:37 AM    

While searching for some stuff done on work spaces and knowledge sharing I came across some fantastic resources from Steelcase. They have tons of stuff -- check out the paper under InSitu learning, really interesting.

11:26:19 AM    

I'm biased in favor of PBL based approaches to learning. It is a lot more work to design and setup, but the payoffs in terms of learning that "sticks" is well worth the initial design time. This is a nice introduction to the concept in a practical setting.

PBL Guide.

Here's an interesting guide to problem based learning:

"This guide is based on what Queen Mary University of London does and its context. It can be used as a guide to developing a PBL system that works in your context...."

... and another one on using case studies!

[incorporated subversion]

11:23:59 AM