This is the year of the hashtag! Hashtags (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag) are being used in emails, forum posts, blog posts, other online services like Instagram or Facebook and even in informal school or college coursework. Children in particular are using hashtags a lot more these days, as evidenced by Hashtag being
Key messages, you’d think, would be carefully thought out before they go into public view. Driving into work one recent morning I was following a van that proclaimed proudly “Fast Response Services”. Laudable, I thought, are these services anything I might want, like plumbing or boilers or cars? But nowhere
I was struggling to write multiple choice questions for a course until I reminded myself of the key rules for writing these tests. #1 Keep the answers as short as possible If the question needs a lot of text put most of it in the question introduction or stem. This
In order to succeed, companies’ strategies for sustainability need to be informed by their context, aware of internal and external factors, and able to adapt with these in mind. A commonly used technique in developing strategy is SWOT analysis, based upon an assessment of ‘Strengths, ‘Weaknesses’, ‘Opportunities’ and ‘Threats’. These
Apparently there is a quote in the Talmud that goes: First learn, then teach. I would go further: First learn, then teach, then carry on learning!
I really am not sure that it matters that a lot of the participants in MOOCs do not officially “complete”. Yet a lot of the furore around MOOCs centres on the fact that only a small proportion of the students actually complete the course. I’d like to argue that it isn’t necessary for students to complete the MOOC to get something out of it.
Legitimate peripheral participation (lurking!) is a phenomenon that has been studied in traditional online courses and communities and is particularly relevant in MOOCs. Someone like myself may well join a MOOC and take from it what I need and have time to get, and be perfectly satisfied with the learning I have achieved, yet perhaps not have completed very many assessment activities or indeed any at all.
Nottingham’s NOOC was an online course on Perspectives on Sustainability open to all staff and students at all three campuses of the University of Nottingham. Here’s the presentation from my talk about it at the Association for Learning Technology conference this week (sorry it’s a bit late!). Click into post for NOOCing Nottingham PDF
I sometimes wonder: am I seen as a geek, working as I do with technology? If so, it seems an odd thing for someone whose primary interest is in people, learning and words. So how did I get into this learning technology thing? When I was young I read a
News reached me today of an interesting new model of learning design from the Applied Pedagogic Research Institute of Learning – an international consortium of researchers and practitioners from Finland, Oman, Okayama and Luxembourg – which promises to ‘promote individual attainment through authentic learning practice via user-driven acquisition of learning
Prototyping Moving on with Moodle (an advanced Moodle course for staff) I don’t tend to create course materials that require a lot of programming – the aim of our whole team at my institution has been to create tools to make the production of materials as easy as a prototype