Below are the slides and abstract of my talk for IT Sligo today:
There is a also a an archived version of my talk
Astract:
In a nutshell screen capture is the art of developing educational materials by capturing a video of what is happening on a computer screen. This simple process can allow rapid creation [...]
Moodle has been claimed to be based be a Social Constructivist pedagogy. It aint. Niall Sclater summed it up, when talking about the OU’s adoption of the eLearning platform, by pointing out that “It can also be argued that LMSs are relatively pedagogy-neutral and and are merely shells in which to place content and activities”. [...]
Today (while editing a student handbook) I am listening to Curtis Bonk author of the World is Open talking about the open movement and its potential impact on Education. He mentioned an alternative to Wikipedia (for wikipediaphobics) the Wikisource project. Actually it is a sister project (all part of the Wikimedia foundation). It aims to [...]
Around this time in Ireland there is usually a lot of discussion of how people are ignoring careers in Science, where our Knowledge Economy will come from, and a lamentation of a lack secondary students doing well in higher Maths.
There was a heart-felt letter in the Irish Times yesterday from a Science PhD in the [...]
Image by Dustin Diaz via Flickr
Twitter is completely stupid. Celebrities use it so you know its very, very stupid. Numerous studies in the respected scienticifc journal Celebrity Cerebrums have noted the inverse correlation between ego and brain size. Scientists have proved that certain celebrities are not actually alive according to their projected brain size and [...]
Dear international reader, let me give you some background into the Irish Education system. Best practice for new (and some not-so-new) primary schools during the last two decades in Ireland has been to house them in temporary wooden cabins known as portacabins. These huts are rented for roughly the equivalent price of a mortgage [...]
Image by Enrico Fuente
Clickers are great for adding interactivity to the classroom. The best thing is they allow some interactivity but not too much. They scale. Like Twitter does. However they cost lost and can be fiddly to set up and annoying to mind and maintain. What are the alternatives?
Online polling: Most famously the free system [...]
Image via Wikipedia
I smiled when I read the title of Jon Dron’s paper “Any Color you like as long as its Blackboard” which is about Virtual Learning Environments. Blackboard, TopClass, FirstClass - it’s interesting how we use metaphors from our existing practice to brand eLearning Platforms.
Within the field of technology acceptance models however [...]
There is a certain type of data you never get from academic surveys. Or at least that you never hear about in the published results.
Now, with the advent of realtime web serach, you can find out what student’s are thinking about VLEs right now
Image by aussiegall via Flickr
The growth of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a classic example of Institutional Learning. The size of the the feature set of VLEs, taking Moodle as an example, is explosive. The complexity and growth of Moodle occurs at many levels. From hardware right up to software through an application [...]
