Sharing PLEs

I think the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) exercise has been a good one. It seems that all Collaborative Teaching & Learning course participants have found it to be a reflective exercise thus far. Some are still tweaking their PLEs, but I will post a list with links to all of them when everyone is done tweaking.

So far it seems most have chosen to post on Flickr and then tweet about them on Twitter. Really love that everyone is trying out some of the new media tools to complete the assignment.

Seeing all of your PLEs makes me think of other tools that I use that I forgot to include, so look for an update on my PLE soon. It's also interesting to see how each one is organized. For mine, I started off with a drawing by hand. (I still love pen and paper as my number one creative tool - especially for brainstorming.) I think for my next version I will sketch out by hand and add some color. Then maybe I will take a digital picture of it.

So stay tuned for more on PLEs and links to PLEs from everyone.

Moodle and Web 2.0

This week we are really diving into creating courses at KIST. We are learning the ins and outs of Moodle, while at the same time keeping in mind the social networking tools that we have been trying out.

The great thing about Moodle is that you can incorporate Web 2.0 tools into the system. Today we tried out adding Twitter RSS feeds into the right hand navigation blocks and than seemed to work really well.

We will continue to try out other tool integrations as we work on our courses this week. Stuart Mealor has a great Moodle course experimentation - trying out integrating a variety of tools into Moodle. Check it out at Elearning.org. You can see he has integrated a Flickr photo stream, his LinkedIn link, delicious, plus a variety of other things.

The key with using Moodle or Web 2.0 learning tools is to think through your objectives and figure out how best to present information to your learners. This also means thinking about how to engage your learners and make learning interactive and participatory. We will continue our work tomorrow, see you in class.

Hands-on Lab - eXe and Moodle

We've been deep in hands-on learning for the past two days in our Collaborative Teaching & Learning 2009 course here in Kigali at KIST.

Exploring the powerful eXe Learning software for creating learning objects, and exploring how to import these objects into Moodle are some of the things we've been doing. It has been great to see everyone trying out the new tools and sharing tips with each other as we go.

eXe is one of several free authoring tools for creating online learning materials. eXe is an XHTML editor that works well if you want to create learning materials without needing to learn Web design. It makes use of instructional devices (iDevices) that are built-in, plus you can add new iDevices that you create. I think the RSS feed iDevice can be a really powerful tool, as you can even pull in RSS Twitter feeds.

You can also pull in a Google Doc - Form into an eXe package. This allows you to add a live questionnaire to a course or website. It is quite a powerful combination.

I think one of the biggest benefits of eXe is that you can publish it in so many ways: as a 1 page web page, a web site, SCORM package, IMS package, iPod notes, a text file, etc. This makes the content reusable for many different types of publishing.

Useful links for learning more about using eXe: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/EXELearning
http://www.rsc-northwest.ac.uk/acl/eMagArchive/RSCeMag0809/eXeLearning/index.html (This one is very comprehensive, it has video clips of how to do many of the basics with eXe)
http://halliance.org/groups/teci/resources/using-eXe-rapid-course-development
http://wikieducator.org/Elearning_XHTML_Editor
http://wikieducator.org/Authoring_with_eXe

Adding Scorm To Moodle

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Interaction in the Classroom

Tuesday we were discussing how learners and instructors have more opportunities to add interaction in the classroom - whether the class is held in-person or remotely.



We've also looked at Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). We decided to each create a graphical representation of our PLEs to share with the group. So, here's mine. It really is just a snapshot of the tools that I use for my personal learning. It seems that my PLE is always somewhat in flux, as I think it should be.

Here are some examples that others have created:
http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams
Some are drawn by hand, others are created with concept mapping software. If you don't have concept mapping software already, you might download:
cMap http://cmap.ihmc.us/
FreeMind - http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download

For other tools in addition to those we already discussed, see Jane Hart's Top tool lists:
http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/articles/10tools.html

Thinking about KIST in 5 Years

Today was a great day to kickoff our face-to-face sessions of Collaborative Teaching & Learning 2009 in Kigali, Rwanda. We met at the Kigali Institute of Science & Technology (KIST) with 12 participants today. We spent time discussing Open Learning concepts.

You can follow along at:
http://etherpad.com/globalmedialab-day9
and follow us on Twitter - twitter.com/globalmedialab

We gathered thoughts about how faculty see teaching and learning changing in the next 5 years at KIST.

Some of the ideas that the group has put forth so far are:

• Reduce contact hours lecturing
• Allow students to explore themselves
• To solve online problems
• Move beyond instructor-led learning to self-directed learning
• More active and interactive learning, less passive
• Greatly expand access to knowledge resources
• Old black board methods are obsolete
• Examinations shall be more practice oriented
• Self learning is key to learning
• Reduce contact hours lecturing
• In next 5 yrs what we teach is obsolete
• Allow students to explore themselves
• Students should be able to adapt to new technologies, presentation - web sharing
• Using of ICT will be more popular in all academic services
• More e-learning resources will be available
• ICT OS enrolling knowledge management
• More robust IT resources (computers + internet connection)
• Students will likely listen to lectures on mobiles, interact with other educational materials on mobile devices

Tomorrow we will spend some extended time exploring some of the new media tools that we have discussed plus a few new ones.

Participatory Culture- Analog and Digital

In our course today we are looking at how social media technologies are changing our culture and the way we learn. Here are a few more resources to help us as we continue this conversation over the next few weeks.

New media literacy and its impact on learning

• The Age of the Informavore A Talk With Frank Schirrmacher - http://www.edge.org/
  

"...population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them" Daniel Dennett

• 
• Not enough brains to cover the explosion of ideas -how do we filter information? How can we help our students? What is the role of an institution of higher learning?
  

• Brian Solis notes: "Social Media didn’t invent conversations, it only surfaced them – giving us the ability to identify opportunities to steer and change perception – and learn, adapt, and improve in the process." http://www.briansolis.com/2009/11/gazing-into-the-future-of-social-media-to-appreciate-the-past

• How many ways do we use available technologies to engage our public in conversation? Meet Alfred Sirleaf and his Daily Talk an analog newspaper in Liberia.
  
  http://www.monocle.com/sections/culture/Web-Articles/The-Daily-Talk/
  

Henry Jenkins outlines several participatory literacy skills Join our Collaborative Teaching & Learning class discussion on EtherPad - http://etherpad.com/globalmedialab-day7. We will continue to discuss participatory media skills that learners need today.

Tools We Like for Reading and Tagging

Web 2.0 tools are abundant - there are so many to choose from for our different learning needs. Today, we took a look at tools that help us track the Web sites that we like to read. Some of the tools work better to help us manage subscriptions, while others allow us more options for annotating the resources that we bookmark.

InnocentTK "I am loving the Google.com/reader.i no longer have to open all my other social networks"

Our conversations about the tools will certainly grow and evolve as we play with them and see how they can fit into our personal learning needs. In general, everyone is starting to try out some of the new tools - that's the best way to see how they work.

We also working to choose a tool for tracking the new terms we are learning in the course. We have created a survey so that you can vote on your favorite Tool for our Word Wall. Which tool should we use to keep track of the terms we are learning in CTL2009? We would like to be able to bookmark pages for later reading, to "tag" pages with keywords, sort the keywords and share with a group.

Vote here. See the full discussion here: http://etherpad.com/globalmedialab-day5