G’day, good morning/evening
I’ve just watched the end of the Ashes cricket series…… well done the Poms 🙂 (There is a tendency in NZ to support anyone who plays and beats our Aussie mates) As I was wide awake I did a bit of exploration to follow up some work I have been doing on ‘situational vs ubiquitous’ computing.’Situational’ really involves encouraging the students to buy and manage their own learning technology, giving them secure access to on and off campus resources (wherever they happen to be and at any time) via wireless networking. Should save the institute a huge amount on the cost of fixed desktop resources while improving student productivity:-)
In the process of course one happens across other diversions and in the posting today there is the usual mixture of sites relating to learning styles, e-learning, professional development, open source and another NEW search engine.
There’s also some stuff on digital copyright issues, a free digital book highlighting what might keep you up at night (apart from the Ashes) some useful stuff on learning design, an excellent report from a JISC funded project relating to the future design of learning spaces (one of my passions)to support the mobile learner, plus some more from the JISC stable if you really want to get going,
and the odd one out for the feint hearted… a dissection that will have you virtually pinned down or hopping along….
go to it 🙂
Regards
Richard
1. The National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) is Australia’s principal provider of vocational education and training (VET) research and statistics. They have produced an excellent publication entitled: Getting to grips with learning styles. This is a free .pdf download or can be purchased offline
http://www.ncver.edu.au/research/proj/nd3103b.pdf?PHPSESSID=897cb3ee065caeb348b225ae58205d5f
2. Another publication with a huge number of links is : Useful Websites for VET information (pdf download)
http://www.ncver.edu.au/pubs/usefulwebsites.pdf
3. A new search engine revs up. It provides thumbnails of the Web pages it finds plus a reasonably comprehensive summary. Nice look and feel. A challenge to Google?
4. A huge range of links to almost everything you wanted to know about e-learning
http://e-learning.start4all.com/
5. Open Access Webliography
“This webliography presents a wide range of electronic resources related to the open access movement that are freely available on the Internet as of April 2005.
In basic terms, the goal of the open access movement is to “make scholarly articles freely available in digital form worldwide with minimal restrictions on their use”
http://www.escholarlypub.com/cwb/oaw.htm
6. Copyright, a new open-access, peer-reviewed journal led by a renowned editorial team, seeks papers on all aspects of copyright in the Internet age.
http://www.copyrightjournal.org/index.php/Copyright
7. What keeps you up at Night? a free digital book from Elliott Masie which provides an isight into what concerns teachers/tutors have in relation to their teaching/learning/professional development and anything else in between
http://www.masie.com/upatnight/
8. The Aussies have set up their own e-learning network. Check out the site for some very useful resources
http://www.elnet.com.au/resources/
as an example from the resource bank have a look at the excellent materials from the University of Wollongong
Extract: “This web site has been designed for teachers and instructors in higher education to access a rich set of resources that support the development of flexibly delivered high quality learning experiences for students”.
http://www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/
9. Interesting Blog from EdtecUK and Josie Fraser. Of interest at this point in time are probably the comments on the ALT-C conference held in UK earlier this month. The report of Stephen Downes keynote is particularly interesting
http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/
10. Once again a JISC funded project produces the goods. The project ‘Study on how innovative technologies are influencing the design of physical learning spaces in the post-16 sector’ has produced a very useful and interesting report
http://www.ldu.bham.ac.uk/espaces/index.htm
Chapter three, ‘”rends and Visions for the future’ is well worth reading (pdf download)
http://www.ldu.bham.ac.uk/espaces/chapterthree.pdf
AND if you want to look at reports from other JISC projects, especially relating to wireless and mobile (situational) learning( way to go 🙂 click on the links from
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/eli_outcomes.html
11. The odd one out…. Have you ever had to dissect a frog for real ? were you hopping mad? You don’t have to any more : Froguts a new animated dissection of the frog and other creatures in virtual space. Check out the demo… fascinating..
http://www.froguts.com/flash_content/index.html
Until the next time…… have a pleasant weekend 🙂
Richard Elliott
relliott@unitec.ac.nz
Never be afraid to try something new.
Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark.
A large group of professionals built the Titanic.