12.30.05
Posted in Blended Learning at 10:27 pm by Norm Garrett
I have been reading a book entitled The Blended Learning Book: Best Practices, Proven Methodologies, and Lessons Learned, by Josh Bersin. This book is a great handbook on blended learning. While it is written primarily for the private sector (business training is the emphasis), many of the ideas and research it contains are applicable to about any educational setting.
One of the interesting concepts that is discussed in the book is the idea of content durability, i.e. the idea that content of certain types can expire. One of the problems with content that is developed using some of our current paradigms (RSS, blogs, etc.) is that the content is not easily managed for validity and currency. This is an essential aspect when managing knowledge (the kind of content that is considered an asset in most businesses). Since the book is narrowly targeted at business and corporate training, it is, at times, difficult to transfer some of the ideas to public sector education. That said, the concepts presented are timely and constitute an excellent introduction to the concepts of blended learning.
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12.14.05
Posted in Tools, wikis at 7:21 am by Norm Garrett
I have been trying to set up some collaborative tools for my MBA course for the spring semester. One of the things I have wanted to do is to set up a course wiki and have the students contribute to it. Unlike what I do with most of my tools, where I erase everything at the end of each semester to give students a fresh start the next semester, I am going to keep the wiki building as an ongoing, long-term project. Each group of students will add to and refine that which has been done previously.
The questions were many as I embarked on this trail. The first was to find a package I could install, given the security restraints of our university’s server. I tried several, but all failed due to various restrictions which we had on the server. Finally, I found one that had both a GNU license and tthat worked on our server. The package I ended up installing was pmWiki. It doesn’t use a database like most wikis. Instead, it uses a flat-file system. While this is not optimal for large wikis, mine is small and it seems to work fine for my use, at least in testing.
Anticipated Problems
I anticipate several problems as I involve the students in this:
The students will have a difficult time posting. Contributing to a wiki is not intuitive, so some training will be required.
The students won’t be sure what kinds of things to contribute. I will have to train them here, too, and give them some good examples.
The students won’t want to participate. Here I’ll be observing the difference between my undergraduate and graduate students, but I have a feeling that students will enjoy participating, since a wiki is a peer-to-peer configuration, rather than a top-down concept.
I’ll report back here as this project matures. A wiki is just one tool in a large toolbox available to us today. In future posts I’ll report on some of the other tools I use, including podcasting, vodcasting, and student-centered RSS feeds.
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12.01.05
Posted in Conferences, Future at 9:47 pm by Norm Garrett
I will be presenting a session at the E-Learning 2006 conference in February, 2006, in Savannah, Georgia. This conference is sponsored by The Instructional Technology Council (a consortium of community colleges) and you can access the web site at http://www.itcnetwork.org/elearning2006.htm. My presentation is entitled Using RSS to Facilitate Learning Communities. All of the concurrent sessions are hour-long sessions and there are almost 60 to choose from. If you want to see the whole program, check out the PDF program file at:
http://www.itcnetwork.org/eL2006FullSchedule.pdf
I am looking forward to the conference and to sharing some of my research with others who are interested.
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