G’day
Well September came and went. The 7th Annual NZ Shar-E-Fest was a great event, well attended with some innovative presentations and workshops. Alan Levine, as expected, was an excellent speaker and workshop facilitator. He kept the audience on their toes and joined in all the activities. Now, as this email goes out, I will be travelling with Alan around the North Island to six other centres where a ‘mini’ Shar-E-Fest symposium will take place. Gives lots more people a chance to listen to Alan and get some great ideas to drive their e-learning endeavours as well as listen to what others have to say. All in all we will probably reach around 700 people, which I guess is equal to a good size conference crowd. Good model, works well and everyone contributes equally to the cost of running the events.
In this month’s posting there are links to science resources, a new book on motivating and retaining learners, a developing online textbook about teaching in the digital age, digital issues in education,badges and microcredentialling, things we’ve learnt about Mooc’s, blended learning, the cost of open source LMS, e-assessment toolkit ,citizen maths, conferences and the odd one out.
Should be some more fireworks in the November edition
Until then, happy reading
1. Curtis J. Bonk and Elaine Khoo have released a new book: Adding Some TEC-VARIETY
100+ Activities for Motivating and Retaining Learners. A PDF of entire e-book as well as all 15 individual chapters available for free downloading from the book homepage . This is an excellent publication with a wealth of information and resources, not to be missed.
Extract from the site:
In this book, you will discover:
A wellspring of Web resources;
10 fully documented successful motivational principles;
Hundreds of activities to motivate and engage online learners;
Proven ideas on how to design interactive and collaborative courses;
A realistic path toward meaningful and relevant online learning;
Detailed risk, cost, and time guidelines for each activity;
A thoroughly researched basis for each idea and activity;
Hope (yes, real hope!) for engaging online learners.
http://tec-variety.com/TEC-Variety_eBook_5-4.pdf
2. Microcredentialling using digital badges is gaining momentum. This Website looks at some of the developments in the world of digital badges and provides some useful resources to design and analyse your own badge ecosystem.
Have a look at : HOW WILL BADGES AND MICRO-CREDENTIALING CHANGE EDUCATION? for another viewpoint
3. Tony Bates has entered the world of online publishing. He is in the process of publishing an open textbook on Teaching in a Digital Age. The first five chapters are under way. This is one you need to bookmark. Tony has been a pioneer and a visionary in the world of teaching and learning, especially that associated with technology. His thoughtful analysis insights, guides, suggestions and ideas provide a solid foundation for developing learning and teaching in the digital age
http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
4. The Blended Synchronous Learning Handbook for Educators is available for download. A useful addition to your educational portfolio.
Extract from the site:
‘It includes the summative findings of the Blended Synchronous Learning case studies, a Blended Synchronous Learning Design Framework, and a range of other resources and information to support blended synchronous learning design research and practice’
5.From Education Dive an interesting synopsis: 10 lessons learned from Mooc’s.
http://www.educationdive.com/news/10-lessons-learned-from-moocs/306113/
6.Blended learning implementation guide Version 2.0. An update on the previous version and a very useful guide to boot. Might be slow to load.
http://digitallearningnow.com/site/uploads/2014/05/BLIG-2.0-Final-Paper.pdf
7. Reality check – Open Source LMS: a costly affair. Worth reading even if you don’t agree with it all.
http://elearningindustry.com/reality-check-open-source-lms-costly-affair?
8. From the Howard Hughes Medical Institute a rich smorgasbord of free resources for science education. There are some wonderful animations here plus a huge range of subject related material. Well worth exploring and bookmarking.
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive
9.Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction By Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, Public Impact.
and
Education Reform for the Digital Era . A collection of essays that address issues of policy, quality control, staffing, funding, and governance for the digital sector.
http://edexcellence.net/publications/education-reform-for-the-digital-era.html
10.e-Assessment Toolkit. This has been around for a while . However. if you haven’t seen it before, it is still a very valuable and useful guide.
http://www.e-assessment.com/resources/e-assessment-toolkit/
11. Citizen Maths. Now’s your chance to improve your maths and make sense of all those machinations you never understood at school.
12. Conferences
12.1 The Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education
(ascilite) warmly invites everyone with an interest in educational
technologies in tertiary education to join us at the 31st ascilite
conference (23-26 Nov 2014, Dunedin, New Zealand).
http://ascilite2014.otago.ac.nz
THE PLACE to be in November
12.2 ADVANCED notice.
ALT Annual Conference 2015: Shaping the future of learning together.
https://www.alt.ac.uk/alt-conference/annual-conference-2015
13. The Odd one out How about some nostalgia and maybe a search for someone who was around in early New Zealand?
Here you go, New Zealand Yesteryears Fascinating and interesting and useful for the hier hunters.
http://www.yesteryears.co.nz/index.html
Bye for now
Richard
Richard Elliott
The Eternal Macademic
Auckland
New Zealand