Thoughts about Learning Design

I'm cleaning out my Bloglines account - Lately I've been flagging articles that look interesting but not getting back to them.

I'm focussing this afternoon on Learning Design....

As long as we focus on lectures/ instructor led workshops for our staff development in-house, we will do little to shift staff members perception of what is an effective learning experience - yet this requires a real focus on making the new staff development activities more engaging, interactive and exciting. Alan Levine talks about the difficulty in getting staff to share their expertise in a less formal way.

He also mentions the Groups feature of Flickr which enables members of a group to discuss images. This would be an easy way, coupled with one of the Flickr uploading tools for teachers to share images with students and be able to have discussion linked to them. I have been thinking about the use of the image database tool in WebCT but that is a more of a standalone tool. I wonder about permissions etc for publishing photos to this site if they include students. I guess there are controls such as being able to restrict access to specified people. I also note from an earlier post that the notes can take html, and add hotspots to photos so you could get as fancy as you desired really.

Alan Levine also has some thoughts about podcasting, only a few of which I am referencing here. As with a screencast, the tools to record audio by itself have been around for a while. But what is different about podcasting is the pull technology where items of interest (or import) are gathered for us by the computer. As he duly notes though, one of the challenges is to draw teachers away from the 'recorded lecture' format. I have been thinking about how podcasting may work in the vocational education sector and would like to try to use it, especially as a means of drawing out some of the underpinning theory from workplace practice. The actual gadgets for delivery are part of the challenge - while with a cd-rom we can offer library computers to access a multimedia rich resource, devices to play audio recordings are far more a personal item.

This page
lists resources for a course in Continuing and Distance Education with a focus on Instructional Design.

Brenda Wisniewski & Kevin McMahon write about "formalising informal learning" with the examples being about integrating knowledge bases and collaboration tools with elearning into the workflow. The examples focus on companies where it sounds like access to up-to-date information is critical and employees see themselves as knowledge workers.
via George Siemens:
An e-toolbox lists a variety of tools available to be used by educators many of which come from JISC projects in the UK. Categories include Assessment Content Creation Communications Learning Management System
Mobile Learning Multi Media Networking Repurposing
Repository Videoconferencing VLE Application Web
Whiteboards, with products noting whether they are commercial, freeware or opensource.

Thoughts about what learner-centred means: "On the periphery, we periodically talk about the learner. This is changing, of course, as concepts of "learner-centered" gain momentum. Yet even this development assumes that our main task is one of giving learners control. It's not. Learner-centered is about designing from the learner's perspective; ensuring the course/content is reflective of the needs of the profiled end-user."