Alec Couros is keynoting (or unkeynoting) at the Melbourne leg of the Personal Learning Environments conference (pleconf) being held next week. He’s asked for help in crowdsourcing his keynote by asking us why networks matter in teaching and learning?
I’m going to ignore the ‘teaching’ word and just concentrate on the ‘learning’ word because that is far more important and far more enabled by the network. I’m sure there are many reasons but this a short post so I’ll limit it to three:
In a reflective mood on my Friday evening commute home I tweeted that:
Being an advocate of #elearning and #edtech in universities is a bit like trying to sell solar panels to oil sheiks
Mark Smithers
marksmithers
Does your university have a minimum online presence policy (MOPP)? Is it successful?
I have a bit of a problem with MOPPs. I don’t think they work and, in fact, I think they are counterproductive. Here are my reasons:
Let’s face it universities aren’t corporations and never have been despite what proponents of university corporatisation would have us believe. Universities are based on a collegiate model in which command and control does not work very well. Simply put, the academy don’t like being told what to do and many will passively resist in reaction. This includes being told that they must use the institution LMS as part of a MOPP. Continue reading
Well it’s the end of the decade and the new one has just started. I thought that, in the name of a harmless bit of fun, I would stick my neck out and make a few predictions about where we might be going with edtech in universities over the next decade. I’ve kept it brief because to explain each one in detail would make this post unbearably long and each subject probably deserves a more detailed post to fully explain my thinking. They also aren’t in any particular order. Let’s see if you agree or not. Continue reading
These are the bookmarks that I have saved to my delicious account using the elearning or edtech tags during the last week. Continue reading
This is an interesting presentation from Clive Shepherd that discusses the skills gap that individuals and institutions face. I have been mulling on many of these issues myself over the last couple of years in particular. Increasingly academic staff are facing a bewildering array of choices in the tools that they can use for course delivery and student engagement. It certainly was a much simpler life 30 years ago. I hope to post more on this soon because I think it is fundamental to some of the issues that universities face in encouraging the uptake of educational technologies. Continue reading
