A series of four e-mail-based virtual conferences is being held in May and June 2004 as a lead-up to the Third Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning.
The current theme is 'Latest Developments' and here are ideas and thoughts that I've picked up so far.
The Hole In the Wall Project in India which showed that:
Groups of 6 to 13 year old children do not need to be "taught" how to use computers. In experiments conducted in India since 1999, [above], it has been shown that children can self-instruct themselves to operate computers. Their ability to do so seems to be independent of their:
Educational background
Literacy levels in the English language or any other language
Social or economic level
Ethnicity and place of origin, i.e, city, town or village
Gender
Genetic background
Geographic location
Intelligence
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Virtual Classroom set ups can provide a viable alternative to video conferencing.
Pro's of Virtual Classroom:
*archiving of presentations for retrieval later
*potentially better for low bandwidth areas
*combination of powerpoint, audio, video etc
Pro's of Video Conferencing
*people like face to face element
*no client-side software issues
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Some interesting thoughts on learning from Ian Moll at SAIDE, the South African Institute for Distance Education. Could not find the report on the website so have sent an email request. Fingers crossed!
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That's the end of the first of four virtual conferences. I'll be starting from the begining of the next one, the topic of which is 'Research and Evaluation'