Graduation versus Learning. People don’t want to learn they wan’t to graduate. This isn’t their fault. In fact its ours. If we wanted people to learn we’d tell them to go read wikipedia, read the bible, read the works of shakespeare, read Jung, Popper, Knuth, Shirkey, Taleb, Buddah, Confuscius, Kawasaki, Seuss, Ellroy, Dawkins, Poe, De [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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
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By definition not everyone can be an innovator. If everyone were being innovative innovation would be the norm. Innovation will always be aberrant. Because we cannot predict the future we cannot say whether a given innovation is good or bad, only that it is different from the norm. In the research [...]
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 [...]
These tools are not sexy. They do not integrate with Twitter or Facebook. They will not transform the way we teach, learn, think or live. They are only useful for some of the small tedious tasks that go on behind the scenes of e-learning:
pdf to html convert a PDF document to html. Incredibly useful. Free. [...]
image by Arash Behshadpoor
There are two types of learning: Institutional Learning and Idealised Learning.
Idealised Learning is eternal and unchanging. It has an idealised learner and an idealised teacher. The idealised teacher:
Wants to teach
Is capable of teaching
Knows more than the learner
The idealised learner:
Wants to learn
Is capable of learning
Knows less than the teacher
Idealised Learning [...]
Open Source VLE Moodle is an example of Bazzar architecture.
Consider a simple yet crucial feature of Moodle: Notifying participants about new postings.
In early versions of Moodle the choice was simple - email. As of Moodle 1.9 however the following are the ways you can be notified of new forum postings:
Get alerts via email
Track unread posts [...]
Because I am lazy I always have a list of things I would like to blog about but never seem to get around to. I may write about some of these things in the future but I will need to chose which one(s). Here is today’s list - anything grab your fancy?
Why the top of [...]
