Third day of the eTutor Seminar

Todays the third day of the eTutor seminar.

The first talk today is about web 2.0 tools and furthermore about copyright and the sensibility of personal data on the internet. Cue: Think before you post. 

Best talk within the three seminar days.

Second day of the eTutor seminar

Looking back to the yesterdays seminar day there were nice devices and tools I got to know.

At first there was a talk about interactive whiteboards and active working on them. It was quite impressing to experience that they are not that expansive that I thought. And so I’m hopeful that they are adopted in educational institutions in the near future.

Another talk was about eLearning tools and the conjunction to didactics. In that coherance we had an eModeration within a chat, which was quite challenging though the participants had different type speed and keeping them on the same pace was not that easy but feasible.

Later on we had a look on OLAT, a web-based open-source learning management system. OLAT looks nice for organizing group work and group working processes.

eTutor Seminar, first day

Today is the first day of the eTutor seminar. 

Content is to get to know Software which is usefull for eLearning.

Today there are tools on the agenda I already knew :-( (Commsy (Groupwork), Twitter (Microblogging), Blogs and Wikis).

Lets take a look if tomorrow there are some new. 

Spending one day with the learning theories

The task was to write about where and how I met one or more learning theories in one typical day.

I perceived two different learning theories today. Maybe there where more. I think, when I focus on that more often in the future, I will find more. Thats my personal task for myself. Think that could be very usefull, not especially for the examina.

The first learning theorie I had consciously contact to today was the behaviourism. I was looking for a flash card programm I’d like to use learning a few definitions for another seminar.

The second learning theorie I detected was situated learning. That was in the moment I thought about writing this post and especially about our elearning seminar. I tried to think about what learning theorie fits best to the seminar. The role of the lecturer is the one of an expert, who offers help in autonomous processing learning situations, if he is asked for. Otherwise he’s watching silently and guiding through the curse with hints.

The online session last tuesday

On tuesday this week we had an online session with our elearning seminar. We were 15 persons in the chatroom.

The goal of todays seminar meeting was having an online session with two talks. We used Adobe Connect for Screensharing for sharing visual informations and skype for the audio.

In the beginning there occured technical problems with Adobe Connect. We, the seminar participants waited about fifteen Minutes till the seminars administration had to decide using skype for audio support.

As the technical problems were solved we had the planned two talks and by the way, both talks were contentual very interesting. From then on everything worked nearliy trouble-free. Only the slides were quite gritty so I sometimes could only guess what has been the content of them. And another remarkable thing was that during the second talk I was cut off from the audio stream, so the administration had to connect me back again.

There’s one advice I’d like to give to you, if you’d like to start an online session for yourself. Keep the microphones of the audience cut off, so the referee and the other listeners will not be disturbed by the sounds that may occure when somebody sneezes oder coughs.

The new tasks for this week

Upcomming a few new tasks from the elearning seminar I worked in this semester.

Keep curious.

Here there are and they are waiting to get answered by me this week.:

1. What did you figure out during our online Session? More about the organisation, but also related to the content if you like. (1st Blogpost)

2. Spend one day with the learning theories. Write about when, where and how you met them in one typical day. (2nd Blogpost)

3. Find interesting Posts in the other student Blogs. Comment at least two Posts from them. The reason could be that it is very good, bad, interesting, …

Creating an eLearning unit

This time the task in the seminar on elearning was to describe the making of a elearning unit. I worked out a unit on blended learning, which you can see here.

How it was made:

To create the blended learning unit I used the following tools:

• iWeb (for those who doesn’t know, iWeb is a WYSIWYG template-based website creation tool made by Apple Inc. and included with its Macintosh computers
• a mobile-me account. This is a subscription-based collection of online services and software offered by Apple Inc.

At first I had to think about the content I want to put into the blended learning unit. I decided to take a scenario of a guitar school.

In the focus of the guitar playing lessons, the pupils have to visit a presence lesson in the rooms of the school. Here they get input from the guitar teacher. He shows some chords, reviews songs, answeres questions, and so on.

After this lesson, the pupils work out at home. Some of the might be fast learners and they get borred with the shown informations. They want to learn more in the meantime. Others need help, because in the lessons they could not follow that good and so they did not get important informations.

All these pupils got one thing together. They need information.

Thats when the idea of this unit came to my mind.

Making the unit is very simple then, with the above idea in mind. Let me show you how.

At first you start iWeb. The first thing you see is a window, in which you choose your favourite template, in which style the webside should appear later. Choose what fits your taste an click ‘choose’.

When you are ready creating your website you push ‘publish’ in the lower left corner. When iWeb is ready with uploading your new created website you can push the button ‘visit’ and safari appears to show you your new website. And you’re done!

Creating an eLearning unit

This short description should instruct you, how we – in our group – created our eLearning unit, we showed in our eLearning seminar a couple of weeks before.

COMING UP VERY SOON

Task #2

This weeks task is to find two definition of eLearning and discuss these on if they might be appropriate or not.

The first definition I found was the one on wikipedia. Perhaps not very imaginative of myself choosing this I must confess, but it seemed interesting to me though.

“Electronic learning (or e-Learning or eLearning) is a type of education where the medium of instruction is computer technology. In some instances, no in-person interaction takes place. E-learning is used interchangeably in a wide variety of contexts. In companies, it refers to the strategies that use the company network to deliver training courses to employees. In the USA, it is defined as a planned teaching/learning experience that uses a wide spectrum of technologies, mainly Internet or computer-based, to reach learners. Lately in most Universities, e-learning is used to define a specific mode to attend a course or programmes of study where the students rarely, if ever, attend face-to-face for on-campus access to educational facilities, because they study online.” (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elearning, from 29.10.2008)

This definition disregards the attendance of humans, respectively teachers, who are attending the learning process of the pupils or students, who are using eLearning. This definition lets me think about a student or pupil left alone on a learning software in front of a computer.

This kind of understanding eLearning seems to be too short-sighted. No student or pupil would be motivated a long time, left alone in front a computer. By no later than the first problems occure, the student or pupil will presumably stop working, because of feeling confused or thrown on the scrap heap. This can’t be an prosperous learning situation anyway.

Lets have a look at another definiton. After the above very generally conceived definition, I was interested in how people or institutions in the adult education define eLearning. I found something very interesting on a website of a managerforum.

One of the most confusing aspects of eLearning is that nobody knows what it is.
We do know the “e” doesn’t stand for “electronic”.
The”e” in eLearning would be better defined as
Evolving or Everywhere or Enhanced or Extended

Based on this survey from a very respected company,
there are many people that have the wrong definition of eLearning.
The survey asked 259 training managers at Fortune 500 firms
what tools they use to create e-learning content.
The top choice was PowerPoint with 66% of responses.
Next was Microsoft Word with 63%,
Macromedia’s Dreamweaver 61% and Flash 47%.
(Respondents could choose more than one.)

Just taking a Word document or PowerPoint presentation and
doing a “Save as HTML” does NOT mean you have created eLearning.

Just taking a F2F presentation and presenting it using a web conference is not eLearning.

We define eLearning as …
A learning environment supported by continuously evolving, collaborative processes
focused on increasing individual and organizational performance.

Effective eLearning thrives at the nexus of web usability, communication,
relationship, document, and Knowledge Management tools
(source: http://managersforum.com/eLearning/Index.htm, from 29.10.2008)

From my point of view this hits the bull’s eye.

I often met people feeling very modern and advanced only because of using information technologies. Using information technologie from my point of view is just one side of the coin on a good eLearning concept. The other side is a good assignment of educational methods. As the definition above says, eLearning thrives on the information technlogie, but (and thats my understanding) not without communication and relationships to other human beeings. As I see it, this only can be the communication and the relationship to a person, who has enough expert knowledge to guide students or pupils through occurring problems, if they wan’t to. From my point of view, for this task this person must be a teacher.

Task #1

At first I would like to write about my experiences I had with eLearning. Well, thinking deeply, …, I had none so far. Shure I’m very interested in information technologie and computers and computer science aswell. I guess the reason I hadn’t had a contact with eLearning is, that eLearning seems to be not a main subject in my education institute. To me ist seems that courses on that subject are thin on the ground.

So what do I expect on a good seminar on eLearning?

Most of all, I’d like to get an overview, what eLearning is and what are it’s advantages and disadvantages. And more over that, I would like to get to know eLearning in practice and not only on the theoretical way.

Looking back to the last session of the new seminar, I would like to say, that I enjoyed the way the people interacted with each other. This promisses a good learning atmosphere and is also a criterion for a good seminar to me. So I’m looking forward to the next session of the seminar.