Tag: Teaching & Learning

  • Facebookedu?

    Are elements of those silly Facebook quizzes and games potentially useful for teaching, at some level? I tend to ignore them, but a comment just now started me thinking about the possibilties. Sam, one of my students, took “What mode of production are are you?” and came out as Feudalism (which some people would think…

  • Captivating

    I’m playing round with Adobe Captivate, moving slides from 3 old powerpoints on UN Peacekeeping into one Captivate presentation which I’ll use today as a flash movie, and also make available to my class as a .avi movie and  an audio only podcast.  I’m fining it a lot of work, but I think the extra…

  • MIT adopts University wide Open Access policy

    Yesterday MIT faculty voted unanimously to provide for full open access to all scholarly publications through an institutional repository. The implementation details remain to be finalised, but the principle is that from yesterday, all their scholarly articles will be published online, and be open to all.

  • Is that the new thing now?

    I really like Understanding Modern Warfare by David Jordan and others – it is a great book for an introductory course on modern war, all of the chapters are good and all of the contributors have done a fine job.  However, Cambridge’s efforts to provide proper, modern text book support for it are feeble –…

  • Outlining V Storyboarding

    I’ve always been an outliner, and a mindmapper, and never been happy storyboarding. In trying to move up from Powerpoint/OpenOffice Impress to flash based tools like Captivate for presentations, I’m finding the storyboard way of developing materials frustrating – I can’t easily move elements of my narrative from one slide to another the way I…

  • CCK08 – if you build it they will come, and even pay

    2200 people took part in a course on Connectivism last term, but only 24 paid and got academic credit – but I do like those figures and that model. It is a great way to reconcile two things which are important in education – that it should be available as widely as possible but that…

  • More on reflective blogging

    I found an interesting diagram on reflective blogging on Niall Scalter’s blog. It reminds me of John Boyd’s famous OODA Loop which was orginally used to describe and refine cockpit design for fighters, but expanded as a general strategic paradigm. The OODA loop is Observe-Orientate-Decide-Act. It is also like the circular or spiral visual methapors…

  • Why Students should blog

    Found this just now “In summary, blogs can be used to encourage students to summarize what they have learned as well as for comparing and contrasting various aspects of what they have internalized. As students begin to articulate their thoughts blogs can help them feel a sense of empowerment as they develop their own voice.…

  • Avatar Me

    I spent time today both talking about avatars for podcasts, and trying to improve my own avatar in Second Life, and I think the world needs a toolkit which will allow people to create a good avatar and make it portable between virtual worlds and for things like podcasts. What I have in mind would…

  • TEFL and Terrorism by Yoda

    I believe I have uncovered a cunning plot by a cadre of unemployed South-East Asian VCR manual writers to infiltrate Ireland and subvert our knowledge economy. These people have invested enormous amounts in plastic surgery to pass as Irish, and have flawless accents, mostly from Cork. They have created fake histories to make it appear…

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