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SCORM in 5 minutes or less, with pictures!
Brief intro to SCORM, explaining how the LMS and learning object talk to each other
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Free SCORM Technical Resources – Ostyn Consulting
Technical information, tools, and white papers for SCORM. Less technical information is available on another page.
Archive for May, 2008
Daily Bookmarks 05/31/2008
May 31, 2008
Daily Bookmarks 05/30/2008
May 30, 2008-
IDEA – The International Dialects Of English Archive
Audio primary source collection with international and regional dialects of English. Intended primarily for actors learning to imitate an accent, but could have other educational uses too.
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AU Press – The Theory and Practice of Online Learning (second edition)
Terry Anderson has edited the second ed. of this book, available online under a CC-NC license. You can download the entire book or just individual chapters by specific authors.
Social Media in Plain English
May 30, 2008The folks at Common Craft have another great video, this time about social media. What I especially like about this one is that it doesn’t talk about technology until near the end. The video focuses on the metaphor of ice cream: it can be mass-produced in a factory that focuses only on flavors with mass appeal, or individuals can create their own flavors at home. This really is about the change in the business & media environment at a high level rather than the specifics of how to use any one technology.
This makes me think about ways I can use metaphor and narrative in the courses I develop, or maybe for facilitator training. We’ve run into resistance from some instructors against using blogs, wikis, and chat, even when they’re integrated within the LMS (removing the “I don’t want to create another log in” argument). A number of our facilitators don’t see why we’d bother with all these new-fangled tools when they can just use the discussion forums for everything. I wonder if an explanation with more of a story, like this video, would be more effective.
Technorati Tags: Common+Craft, social+media, web20, changemanagement
Daily Bookmarks 05/28/2008
May 28, 2008-
50 Tips and Tricks to Create a Learning Space in Second Life | College Degrees
Resources and tools for using Second Life for education and training
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Sensory Integration | Brain Rules |
Several people have mentioned John Medina’s book Brain Rules. A lot of this sounds common sense, but check the footnotes on slides 2 & 3 for his rule “Sensory Integration: Stimulate more of the senses.” He has a nice chart about how much more we remember for passive/active learning with multiple senses stimulated. He cites Dale’s cone of experience, but he has numbers for each level, so we know he’s, shall we say, stretching the research a bit.
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Social Networking: Learning Theory in Action
Exploring how social networking applications could be used to create a more social constructivist learning environment to support collaboration, creativity, and networking. (The author calls it “social learning theory” and contrasts it with “objectivist” learning, but never uses the phrase “social constructivism.” Still, it seems like that’s what she’s describing.)
Daily Bookmarks 05/26/2008
May 26, 2008-
Miguel Guhlin summarizes ways to use Diigo in education. Also includes directions on signing up and subscribing to RSS feeds for tags.
Daily Bookmarks 05/24/2008
May 24, 2008-
GlassGiant.com – Make pictures for your Facebook Photos!
Some silly photo editing and image creation tools. More useful ones include creating a keyboard button with any word you want on it (Smite is the example given) and a chalkboard with a message of your choice. I could do these in Photoshop, but this would be easier.
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fd’s Flickr Toys: Do fun stuff with your photos
Fun things to do with digital images
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For My Summer 2008 C&I 401 Students « Cycling Through Ed Tech
Cheri Toledo writes about internet safety, plus Twitter as a Personal Learning Network for teachers. I love her phrase to describe the typical paranoid response to kids being online: the “Ostrich Safety Method.”
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Too often, school boards and districts, teachers, and parents use the Ostrich Safety Method: block everything and don’t talk about it. This is not a sound educational method.
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14 “OTHER” Ways to Use RSS Feeds | MakeUseOf.com
Essentially a list of applications that use RSS–forward emails to RSS, create widgets, send reminders to RSS, etc.
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Wikis in Higher Education (and at UD) – Mathieu Plourde
Profiles of multiple professors using wikis for their courses at the University of Delaware
Learning from Great Comments
May 24, 2008
I know that I said I’d do Task 17 of the Comment Challenge, the Five in Five. I’ve tried twice to do this task this week. Unfortunately, both times I’ve failed to prove I was human to the Captchas and lost my first comment. No way I can do 5 comments in 5 minutes if I have to rewrite an entire comment. I really wanted to try to push myself, but I’m giving up on this task now. Maybe after the challenge is officially over I’ll make another attempt.
Day 19: Respond to a Commenter on Your Own Blog
Those of you who have commented here before know that I’m pretty good about replying, usually within 48 hours. Check that one off the list.
Day 20: Three Links Out
Here’s the directions for this task:
This task is based an idea by Dave Ferguson that he calls “Three Links Out” or “Three Clicks Out.” It’s a way to find and explore blogs that aren’t as familiar to you.
- Go to one of the blogs you regularly read and follow a link to another blog. This link could be in the blogroll or in a post.
- From that blog, follow a second link to a new blog.
- From that location, follow a third link to somewhere new.
From Michele Martin’s blog, I went to Rob O.’s blog because I thought his definition of “constructive comments” was good. From there, I found an interesting post on multitasking on Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk blog.
Day 21: Make a Recommendation
I doubled up on the last task: when I commented on Doug Johnson’s blog, I included a link to the Eide Neurolearning blog and some research on dual-tasking. The relevant quote from this post is “…at least in some cases, less brain work is used for solving two tasks at once, then the two tasks separately (underadditivity).” If you’re interested in seeing actual research on multitasking, do check out their blog, including the related posts at the bottom of the one I quoted.
Day 22: Highlight a Favorite Comment
Britt Watwood asked a question which prompted my post on Community Size & Connection Strength. That post, in turn, generated some great comments. Here’s some snippets:
Britt described Clay Shirky’s model of groups:
It is the smaller networks within the larger ones that maintain coherence and connection amidst the larger group (what he calls the “small world theory”). These “small world” clusters work as amplifiers and filters within the larger network, just as your strong connections work across multiple larger networks.
Suz talked about how different technology facilitates different group sizes:
I think it also depends what you mean by ‘manage’, and what ‘venue’ the community uses. I cannot imagine, for example, how people manage large twitter networks. The fragmented nature of the information makes it hard to follow, and I find it easier if I know a little about the person, to give context.
Bonnie viewed group dynamics from the lens of the comment challenge (plus she paid me a wonderful compliment):
I had my original small circle and most recently I went beyond my comfort zone with the Slices Challenge and now here and it’s comforting to open a strange blog and find a friendly face.
Looking from the perspective of teaching, Ken Allen wrote about managing students and lurkers in an online environment. He made this interesting observation:
Of course, with a larger, manageable group, the tendency is for the teacher to apply strategies to encourage participation by those who tended to take a back seat. The paradox with this technique is that the activity of the group starts tending towards the unmanageable zone and eventually has to be divided into smaller groups.
Day 23: What Makes a Great Comment?
Like most bloggers, I appreciate every non-spam comment I get. Any interaction is good. That said, I especially like comments that move the conversation forward by doing any of the following:
- Asking good questions (like Britt’s above)
- Sharing resources (like Ken’s above)
- Sharing personal experiences & how something applies in their life (like Bonnie’s above)
- Revealing a different perspective, approach, or way of looking at something (like Suz’s above)
- Disagreeing & making me think
These types of comments are especially helpful in my personal learning, and I really do appreciate these gifts from the blogosphere. Thanks to everyone who comments and shares their personal wisdom!
Technorati Tags: comment08, Comment+Challenge
Daily Bookmarks 05/23/2008
May 23, 2008-
Dropdown low down — Tyssen Design
Comparison of accessibility of numerous dropdown menus using CSS and Javascript
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Shorter, Intensive Courses Rated More Effective
Study based on survey results showing that accelerated university courses were rated higher overall by students. The press release mentions research on learning outcomes, but doesn’t cite anything.
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“A wealth of scholarship reveals that students seem to learn as well in abbreviated courses as they do in longer ones, but we wanted to see which format students rate as more effective. We looked at effectiveness, as indicated by course instructor surveys, and found that intensive nine- and 11-week classes garnered significantly higher overall course ratings, even after controlling for class size, probable grade in course and workload.”
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Daily Bookmarks 05/22/2008
May 22, 2008-
ParentCentral.ca – News & Features – Where teachers learn diversity
Article from the Toronto Star on integrating diversity in teacher education programs, therefore fostering a sense of respect for diversity in the classroom. Nice example of integrating diverse perspectives in geometry using Moroccan tiles, plus community involvement through parent computer training.
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And before they set foot in a classroom, student teachers must examine their own cultural identity – race, gender, social class, even sexual orientation – so they are aware of the bias they may bring to a classroom.
“Our research shows who you are impacts how you deal with children, so the worst thing is to act colour-blind,” said Solomon, whose urban diversity program has graduated more than 1,000 teachers over the past 14 years, many of whom have gone on to school leadership positions in the field of equity.
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“Teachers need to know more than the 3 R’s; if you don’t know the community your students live in – the social, the racial dynamics – you won’t be as effective,” said Solomon.
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The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
American history museum with some online exhibits and primary source materials. Quizzes and other materials for teachers also available.
Quick and Dirty Comment Analysis
May 21, 2008Michele Martin asked how I did the comment analysis to see which posts have generated the most conversation. This is task 18 in the comment challenge. I actually manually typed the numbers into OpenOffice Calc (after scanning the list of posts in my WordPress dashboard for posts with a decent amount of comments). However, there is a faster way to get a “quick and dirty” analysis of your comments and conversations.
AideRSS is a tool that lets you filter a feed for the “best” posts. It ranks your posts by how much conversation they have generated, based on comments, del.icio.us links, tweets, Diggs, and Google trackbacks. Enter your URL and let it do the analysis. View the “Top 20″ to see what they consider to be the best conversations.
For blogs that have been going a while, this isn’t ideal as an overall picture. It doesn’t go back far enough in your history. My Top 20 goes back to last July, but I think that’s because I actually played with this tool previously. Michele’s Top 20 only goes back to February 26. When I checked hers today, it let me know that they had never analyzed her blog before. I guess the first time it only goes back 90 days. It would let you know about recent activity though, and for a newer blog it wouldn’t matter.
AideRSS is actually designed to let you filter sites with lots of post to just get the “cream of the crop,” but I think it would work for the challenge. I’m sure some blog hosts have a good way to do this already, but I don’t think WordPress has anything built in to see stats on comments.
If you know of another way to get a quick and dirty analysis like this (without installing Google Analytics or something similar), let me know. I’d love to hear about it!
Technorati Tags: comment08, comment+challenge, analysis, rss, AideRSS, conversation
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