Daily Bookmarks 10/29/2009

• Comprehensive List of Free Online Classes and Online Courses

  Lots of open courseware classes from different universities, sorted by subject. Nice to have an aggregated list from the various sources

  tags: e-learning, education, openaccess, free, highered

• Volunteer Opportunity to Build Your eLearning Portfolio | onehundredfortywords

  Info on an organization looking for volunteer instructional designers/developers to create content for job seekers. They are OK with content being used in a portfolio, so this is a good place to gain some experience and get something to show for a portfolio.

  tags: e-learning, portfolio, career, instructionaldesign

• Sakai Pilot Evaluation Final Report

  UNC report on their pilot of Sakai as a replacement for Blackboard. Quote from a faculty member in the report: “Have heard many complaints about Blackboard being kludgy. Sakai is graceful.”

  The minimal support needed is a good sign of Sakai’s overall usability: “First, of the more than 1,000 people using a completely new collaborative learning environment for almost a full year period, we had a total of 264 tickets—the vast majority of which (74%) were for requests to use the system (new sites
  and new user accounts)…In summary, from a support perspective, 54 substantive help requests on behalf of more than 1,000 pilot participants over a nearly one-year period was a very positive finding.”

  tags: e-learning, highered, education, sakai, lms, blackboard, usability

• The eLearning Coach » Blog Archive » User Interface Design For eLearning – Updated

  Tips and simple examples for user interface design. The elevator example is perhaps not the best metaphor for structuring learning, but the concept is good.

  tags: e-learning, usability, design, instructionaldesign

 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 10/26/2009

• Swftools.com – Flash tools, utilities, applications, components

  Directory of tools that do at least some of what Flash can do or that work with Flash–presentation tools, quiz tools, PowerPoint to Flash converters, ActionScript editors, etc. Most have free demos; not many open source options in this area.

  tags: flash, tools, multimedia, actionscript, opensource

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 10/22/2009

• Guide to Annotating using Diigo

  Screencast showing annotation feature in Diigo

  tags: diigo, tutorials, screencast, education

• Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn: Scientific American – Sean Kearney’s Lifestream

  Interesting research–totally flies in the face of how most of us think about designing learning. Do we design learning environments that allow people to fail enough to learn?

  tags: learning, research

  • The idea embedded in this approach is that if students make errors, they will learn the errors and be prevented (or slowed) in learning the correct information. But research by Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork at U.C.L.A. that recently appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition reveals that this worry is misplaced. In fact, they found, learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 10/16/2009

• Screenr – @minutebio: Adding Learning Interactions in Adobe Flash using Flash’s Common Libraries

  Quick screencast on using Flash’s Common Library of learning interactions

  tags: e-learning, flash, screencast, howto

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 10/15/2009

• Open Access Educational Technology journals – George Veletsianos

  Looking for research on e-learning, instructional design, educational technology, or related topics? Check out these open access journals. Great to have a filtered list for this rather than having to dig through some of the larger directories.

  tags: edtech, education, technology, research, openaccess, e-learning, instructionaldesign

• 30 Stunning Fonts To Enhance Your Designs | Fonts | instantShift

  Free fonts & additional links for free fonts. Check the licensing and be careful though; some are personal use only, some require registration, at least one requires personal info & credit card even though it’s “free.”

  tags: free, fonts

• Online Degrees Viewed More Favorably : Industry Market Trends

  Results from several studies on the increasing acceptance of online degrees by employers

  tags: e-learning, highered, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 10/14/2009

• SuddenlySmart – What is Effective E-learning?More than just “click next”: concrete ideas for more effective interactivity. Examples provided for intrinsic feedback, delayed feedback, case studies, branching scenarios, motivation.

  tags: e-learning, instructionaldesign, interactivity, feedback, scenarios

• The New Literacy: Stanford study finds richness and complexity in students’ writing

  Young people write more than they used to, and they don’t just write when it’s required. The study also found that spelling errors aren’t as much of a problem as they were 20 years ago, now that spell check software is easily accessible.

  tags: writing, web2.0, change, research

  • Today’s kids don’t just write for grades anymore. They write to shake the world. Moreover, they are writing more than any previous generation, ever, in history. They navigate in a bewildering new arena where writers and their audiences have merged.
  • For these students, “Good writing changes something. It doesn’t just sit on the page. It gets up, walks off the page and changes something,” whether it’s a website or a poster for a walkathon.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Course Writer vs Instructional Designer and SME

Pam Vreeland, my manager, posted a question in a LinkedIn group that has prompted some great discussion there. She graciously agreed to let me republish her question here, as I’m curious what others think about these two models for course design.

A colleague of mine challenged my thinking recently on course design.

I have always preferred having an instructional designer and a SME work collaboratively to develop online course work. Her position is that a course writer can do the job of both as long as he/she is good at researching the topic. I am not convinced.

Thoughts?

So what do you think? Do both models work? Are there certain situations where you would choose one model over the other?

Daily Bookmarks 10/11/2009

• New evidence that bullet-points don’t work : Speaking about Presenting

  Research applying cognitive load theory to slide presentations providing evidence that slides crammed full of text aren’t effective for helping people learn and remember

  tags: cogpsych, research, presentation, powerpoint, learning

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 10/10/2009

• You call this Academic Honesty? | Webb of Thoughts

  Great example of why I get so frustrated when I hear people complaining about how terrible it is that students copy and paste content. I’d like to see the teachers and professors stop using uncited content themselves first; I see a lot more problems with people with graduate degrees. This lecturer on effective writing plagiarized content for handouts while simultaneously admonishing students to not plagiarize.

  tags: writing, education, highered, plagiarism

• Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com

  Power laws describing how networks and social networking work, some supported by research, some simply observations of human behavior

  tags: networks, socialnetworking, economics

  • Amara’s Law (backstory) states that “we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

  • 11. Metcalfe’s Law

    This was the original conception of network effects, whereby the potential value of a network grows exponentially according to its size.

  • The fundamental definition of a network effect is “when a product or service has more value the more that other people have it too.”
  • In fact, the Principle of Least Effort notes that they will tend to use the most convenient method, in the least exacting way available, with interaction stopping as soon as minimally acceptable results are achieved. As a result, well-known social scientist Clay Shirky notes that the most “brutally simple” social model often is the most successful one (using Twitter as an example.)

  • Reed’s Law

    Researcher David Reed discovered that the network effect of social systems is much higher than would otherwise be expected, helping to explain the sudden rise of social systems in the latter half of this decade. While adding a social architecture to a piece of software for no specific reason isn’t helpful either, it turns out that in general, software (and indeed, any networked system) is better the more social it is.

  • Reflexivity asserts that social actions can and do in fact influence the fundamental behavior of a social system and that these newly-influenced set of fundamentals can then proceed to change expectations, thus influencing new behavior. The process continues in a self-reinforcing pattern.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 10/09/2009

• Weblogs and Their Effects on Writing Skills

  Case study of blogs used with fifth graders to improve writing skills. In both classes reviewed, blogs improved “both rich content and author’s craft” but not grammar and spelling.

  tags: education, writing, k-12, blog, casestudies, research

• Collaborative Blogging as a Means to Develop Elementary Expository Writing Skills

  Study on collaborative blogging with third graders that resulted in improved attitudes towards writing, improved quality of writing, and a number of unintended benefits

  tags: education, writing, k-12, blog, collaboration, research

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.