This December at ELKS (the community of expertise which I manage for the UN’s Global Alliance for ICT in Development initiative) we’ve adapted a December tradition to produce an “Advent of technology” Calendar – with a resource, tool or tip about e-learning for every day of December. There are 30
Why should educational developers and learning technologists make efforts to ensure their e-learning materials are accessible? There is of course the legal side of things in the UK: The Disability Discrimination Act, Part IV 2001(SENDA) requires responsible bodies to anticipate the requirements of disabled people or students and make appropriate
I love it when materials in a course turn out to be relevant and topical. In my Season of Inspiration writing course at the moment we are this week writing about caves and other underground spaces. We already have great inspiration from some fabulous photographs from Nottingham’s Papplewick Pumping Station
I have recently been doing risk assessments of some e-learning projects we have in train. There are some risks that seem to cross all types of projects in a variety of contexts. When assessing risks of e-learning projects I consider: * Likelihood (high, medium, low) * Potential impact (high, medium,
Do you use e-learning or learning technologies such as discussion forums etc. in teaching? Have you used or adapted Salmon’s 5-stage model or e-tivities framework in your teaching? Or have you used it at any time in the past few years? Gilly Salmon’s 5-stage model and e-tivities framework have been
The Bazaar – Homehttp://www.bazaar.org/The Bazaar – portal for Open Source for Learning in EuropeThe Bazaar is a community portal for people who want to use, exchange and share Open Source Software and resources to support learning. Distance Learning through Telematicshttp://www2.plymouth.ac.uk/distancelearningThe University of Plymouth’s e-learning website, containing regularly updated pages of
Principles for user-generated content serviceshttp://www.ugcprinciples.comTo protect copyright in services providing user-uploaded and user-generated audio and video content. It’s good to see copyright being taken account of. But a shame that it’s about commercial content and not that of the users themselves… One thing that sometimes surprised me when I was
Some interesting social software for learning: Ectohttp://www.ectolearning.com/Their blurb: “Ecto is a hosted, open networked Personal Learning Environment. Use Ecto to transform learning into an interactive, collaborative, and student centered activity. Ecto is the only learning management system built from the ground up on the principles and architecture of social software.”
When the Web was new, individual researchers posted their articles, research papers, reports and other research outputs online in their own spaces: there was no systematic way to find such articles, papers and drafts. The copyright restrictions of publication often mean that researchers no longer have the right to put
The reasons why University staff are considering e-learning in their courses tend to be as varied as the disciplines they come from and almost as varied as the individuals concerned. Some of the drivers are: from above, e.g., Department or Faculty head: “our modules should use the VLE more”; from