In Defence of Glo Maker

Last semester some of you saw a presentation and workshop by Tom Boyle on Glo Maker. I think we were all initially enthusiastic about Glo Maker until we tried using it. We then began making comments like "it isn't all that easy to use", "it doesn't seem to do a lot", "it isn't very flexible".

I went to a seminar last Wednesday which consisted of a series of presentations about e-Learning work at LondonMet (of course Second Life was quite prominent). Tom Boyle was showing some of the work he had done with others in the room developing Glo Maker based systems. He explained that Glo Maker didn't start out as a project to make a tool for making e-Learning resources. It began as a project to make a library of reusable learning objects. People kept asking for slight variations in the way the objects worked, so then they set about making Glo Maker as a tool where the user can make their own object.

This made me feel much more sympathetic to Glo Maker and I think shows a general issues with any tool. The more flexible the tool is, the more difficult it is to use it. Is this true? What do you think?

An enjoyable and thought provoking video

Have a look at this.



I think its a great way of illustrating the voice and also contains a lot of very interesting ideas and viewpoints of current education.

Literature sources discussed online on Tuesday 30th November

As promised...

Terry Mayes - JISC e-Learning Models Desk Study - Learner-centred pedagogy: Individual differences between learners - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Stage%202%20Learning%20Styles%20(Version%201).pdf

Fowler, C and Mayes, T - JISC e-Learning Models Desk Study - Stage 2: Mapping Theory to Practice and Practice to Tool functionality based on the Practitioners' perspective - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Stage%202%20Mapping%20(Version%201).pdf

Britain and Liber - A Framework for the Pedagogical Evaluation of VLEs - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/jtap/jtap-041.pdf

Diana Laurillard - Digital Technologies and their role in achieving out ambitions for education - ww.ioe.ac.uk/publications (2008)

BECTA - Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning - www.becta.org.uk (2008)

Hope you find these of use

Nigel

What's your definition of Pedagogy?

Hi all,
Further to our discussion with Nigel, I now pose the question of a definition for Pedagogy? Needless to say there isn't one clear definition out there in the ether, but there are simular themes. The general theme is that Pedagogy is the art and science of how something is taught and how students learn it.

My own interpretation is that pedagogy includes how the teaching occurs, the approach to teaching and learning, the way the content is delivered and what the students learn as a result of the process, in other words to give learners links (help and guidance) to be able to take the learning further on their own.

What's your definition?

The following are just a few links for definitions of pedagogy:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pedagogy

http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/pedagogy-what-does-it-mean-2370

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elearning_pedagogy.html

http://wiki.rscwmsystems.org.uk/index.php/Introduction_to_pedagogy

Useful links

Hi all,

As promised here are some links that you might find useful in guiding your work on this module.

Panel discussion from ALT (Association for Learning Technology) 2010 (includes Prof John Cook, LTRI @ London Met) -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FadZG6RkvLM&feature=channel

Note:

You may want to skip through parts of this. The intro is quite long before they get into some interesting ideas.

Study of UK Online Learning - v recent

http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2010/rd17_10/rd17_10.pdf

Deep Learning Design - paper by London Met's Prof Andrew Ravenscroft -

http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/1598097/1150202535/name/DLD%28EC-TEL10-SPdist%29.pdf

ALT/eLN lunchtime webinars

Gilly Salmon will presenting the next FREE lunchtime webinar on 6th Dec -

http://www.alt.ac.uk/workshop_detail.php?e=381

More information and link to booking form available from link provided.

Please post your comments and reflections on these links to this blog.

See you next week (9th November).

Nigel

K12 Online Conference

If you have time have a look at the K12 Conference. We contributed a video for this last year - Virtually Linked, Lawal Mohammed (as part of his CUP128 assignment) and me. Its already part way through but there are still qute a few live events and the online material remains available, I think, indefinitely. You may want to refer to material on here in your assignment.

Sketchup and Furniture

Google Sketchup is a free 3D modelling package. In theory Sketchup COLLADA models can be imported into Second Life (but I can't get it to work at the moment). Have a look at the Sketchup Blog showing Sketchup being used to model furniture.