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Online Learning News and Research
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Saturday, January 22, 2005
Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age - George Siemens, Instructional Technology and Distance Learning
Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments. These theories, however, were developed in a time when learning was not impacted through technology. Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn. Learning needs and theories that describe learning principles and processes, should be reflective of underlying social environments. Vaill emphasizes that “learning must be a way of being – an ongoing set of attitudes and actions by individuals and groups that they employ to try to keep abreast of the surprising, novel, messy, obtrusive, recurring events…” (1996, p.42). Learners as little as forty years ago would complete the required schooling and enter a career that would often last a lifetime. Information development was slow. The life of knowledge was measured in decades. Today, these foundational principles have been altered. Knowledge is growing exponentially. (0) comments
More New Jersey professors begin to use Internet instruction - KELLY HEYBOER, Star-Ledger Staff
Less than a quarter of the courses offered at New Jersey colleges and universities are conducted partially or fully over the Internet, according to a new survey designed to gauge how the state's higher education system is using technology. The survey presented to the state Commission on Higher Education in Trenton yesterday found about 77 percent of the nearly 48,600 college courses offered for credit around the state are conducted in traditional classrooms and lecture halls. About 4 percent of courses are offered completely online, according to the survey. Another 18 percent are considered partly online because professors post assignments and class materials on Web sites or offer some lessons over the Internet. (0) comments
Building Educational Portals atop Digital Libraries - Sean Fox, Cathy Manduca, and Ellen Iverson; D-Lib Magazine
The Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College (SERC) builds educational portals on an infrastructure suffused with digital library technologies and sensibilities. Yet our users—largely geoscience faculty looking for resources and information that will help them improve their teaching—don't think of us as a digital library (if indeed they have any notion of what that term means). Our portals identify focused topics of importance to educators and present information on these topics through a variety of structures—there is no presupposition that a collection of metadata and a search engine will be the best solution. Yet as we built the tools to support the creation of these portals, it became clear that collection building (at least on a small scale) and, more generally, a systematic approach to collecting and organizing the information within our sites would be a recurring theme. These are traditional strengths of a digital library. So we built portal tools that integrate and interoperate with digital library elements at a number of levels. (0) comments Friday, January 21, 2005
What can the Semantic Web do for Adaptive Educational Hypermedia? - Alexandra I. Cristea, Journal of Educational Technology and Society
Semantic Web and Adaptive Hypermedia come from different backgrounds, but it turns out that actually, they can benefit from each other, and that their confluence can lead to synergistic effects. This encounter can influence several fields, among which an important one is Education. This paper presents an analysis of this encounter, first from a theoretical point of view, and then with the help of LAOS, an Adaptive Hypermedia (authoring) framework that has already taken many steps towards accomplishing the goals of the Semantic Web. Here we also show how the LAOS framework, and more specifically, its implementation, MOT (My Online Teacher), can be re-written in Semantic Web languages, as an exercise of bringing Adaptive Hypermedia and the Semantic Web closer together. (0) comments
EU eLearning Survey - Paul Justice, eLearning Scotland
The European Union (EU) has several funding programmes that support eLearning initiatives. These funding opportunities require eLearning practitioners to form transnational partnerships. In order to assist this process, the EARLALL Association and five other regions of Europe have started to work together on eLearning through their regional representations to the EU in Brussels. (0) comments
UMassOnline Kicks Off Fifth Year with Six New Online Programs
Kicking off its fifth year and fifth spring semester, UMassOnline today introduces six new online programs, bringing its portfolio to 45 online degree and certificate programs. With the addition of online continuing medical education (CME) courses from UMass Medical School, UMassOnline now represents every campus in the UMass system. UMassOnline’s six new programs extend the convenience and quality of UMassOnline’s accredited online education to professionals in hospitality and tourism, heath care, social services, hospital and health agency administration, and criminal justice. (0) comments Thursday, January 20, 2005
A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research - Constance Elise Porter, Journal of Computer-Mediated Com.
Despite the growing popularity of virtual communities, there is no consensus among researchers regarding the appropriate definition or types of virtual communities. In this paper, a virtual community is defined as an aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact around a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially supported and/or mediated by technology and guided by some protocols or norms. The central objective of developing this typology was to develop a classification system that would be useful to researchers from various disciplinary perspectives such that the classification system might be used as a foundation for theory construction. The proposed typology serves its intended purposes and is evaluated against criteria put forth by Hunt (1991). The proposed typology uses establishment type and relationship orientation as the key categorization variables, reconciling problems posed by other researchers who attempt to use attributes as categorization variables. It is simple, pragmatic for practitioners and useful for researchers seeking to develop an understanding of the virtual community phenomenon. (0) comments
Oregon State University offers high-schoolers fun online courses
High school students interested in Oregon’s flora and fauna can study it online with other students from around the state in “Wildlife and Forestry of Oregon,” one of many high school courses now available through the K-12 Online program at Oregon State University Extended Campus. The popular life science class is offered as a collaboration between the Oregon Forest Resources Institute and the K-12 Online program. Offered for the first time last spring, this course brings together students from cities and rural areas in Oregon to discuss forest management and wildlife topics in their respective regions, as well as the role forest management plays in maintaining a healthy and diverse wildlife community. (0) comments
UK Police learning to fight online crime - Daniel Thomas, Vnunet
Police officers in England and Wales are to receive basic training in tackling computer and internet-related crimes. An elearning course will be introduced later this year following calls from the Home Office to create a national 'netcrime training and delivery' programme. Officers will receive training to tackle rising instances of identity fraud, extortion, piracy and child pornography. (0) comments Wednesday, January 19, 2005
A Diamond in the Rough: Divining the Future of E-Content - Arnold Hirshon, Educause Review
Divining the future of technology and e-content—and the relationships between the two—is, at best, an inexact science. What appears in the headlines of articles in daily or weekly newspapers and magazines will not usually present a fully formed trend, but the bellwethers are often there to provide some productive avenues for further exploration. (0) comments
Nigeria Open Varsity System, a Necessity - Josephine Lohor, Lagos This Day
Abuja President Olusegun Obasanjo has said that the open university system is a necessity because no matter the amount of money available to the Federal Government, it would not be able to provide tertiary education to all those that desire it from the classroom. The president said the federal government decided to re-establish the open university system because of the potential to provide higher education and at a cheaper rate compared to conventional schools. (0) comments
A new era for education in Bahrain - MOHAMMED AL A'ALI, Gulf Daily News
A click of a button launched Bahrain's schools into cyber space yesterday. His Majesty King Hamad hit the computer key to officially launch e-learning in secondary schools. The King Hamad Future Schools Project was launched at the first school in the country, the Al Hedaya Secondary School for Boys, opened in 1919. "This is the first of many phases intended to develop education in the country and lead it into the future," said the King. (0) comments Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Tomorrow's programmers, tools and e-learning - Eric Wilson, the Age
Interactive games and simulations may make online learning fun but they add significant cost and production time. But this will not always be the case. For example, 10 years ago, Visual Basic was considered a toy and its programmers mere "code kiddies", claiming they could produce business solutions faster than anyone else. Likewise, today's code kiddies and their toy programming tools will probably fashion the future of e-learning and possibly the rest of IT. (0) comments
Learn.com Announces $40 Million Software Grant Program in Support of the National Education Plan
Learn.com, Inc., the worldwide leader in on-demand e-learning technology and services, today announced that the company will kick off the 2005 year by launching a $40 million software grant program to support the National Education Plan released on January 7, 2005 by the Department of Education. The Learn.com Software Grant will also assist American educational institutions with their efforts to bring blended learning to their campuses while extending their reach using the worldwide web. Eligible institutions are limited to K-12, colleges, universities, and vocational schools based in the United States. (0) comments
Net Team Taps into Expat Brains - Owen Hembry, New Zealand Herald
An online network set up to link information technology experts around the world has scored its first big success, allowing a widely scattered team to develop a million-dollar software project. Based at Auckland University, the Innovators Online Network (ION) is tapping into a network of expatriate New Zealanders to team local IT brains with global expertise. (0) comments Monday, January 17, 2005
The Death of Distance: Documenting the Effects of Distance Education In South Dakota - Steve WHEELER and Shannon AMIOTTE, TOJDE
Implementing distance education in any context can be daunting and problematic. To establish a State-wide distance education project such as the DDN in South Dakota is an achievement of some magnitude. However, regardless of the difficulties, the lessons learned and the solutions applied are beginning to reap rewards. The tensions will continue, because distance education is both a part of the solution and a part of the problem. Notwithstanding the authors maintain that distance education is the way forward to addressing the problems of the tyranny of distance. (0) comments
Reasoning and Ontologies for Personalized E-Learning in the Semantic Web - Nicola Henze, Peter Dolog and Wolfgang Nejdl; JET&S
The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information by taking the individual needs and requirements of the users into account. In this paper we propose a framework for personalized e-Learning in the semantic web and show how the semantic web resource description formats can be utilized for automatic generation of hypertext structures from distributed metadata. Ontologies and metadata for three types of resources (domain, user, and observation) are investigated. We investigate a logic-based approach to educational hypermedia using TRIPLE, a rule and query language for the semantic web. (0) comments
When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction(1) - Steven D. Krause, Karios
....Clearly, the role of blogs in different writing classes varies considerably. However, a quick glance through these examples (especially Mueller's and Blackmon's) would suggest that many writing teachers seem to be using blog spaces as places to facilitate dynamic and interactive writing experiences. This approach to the use of blogs is consistent with what at least some advocates of weblogs in educational settings have suggested for a while now. (0) comments Sunday, January 16, 2005
Blurring the Boundaries? Supporting Students and Staff within an Online Learning Environment - Susannah QUINSEE and Judith HURST, TOJDE
The inclusion of online learning technologies into the higher education (HE) curriculum is frequently associated with the design and development of new models of learning. One could argue that e-learning even demands a reconfiguration of traditional methods of learning and teaching.... However, this transformation in pedagogic methodology does not just impact on lecturers and teachers alone, as the HEFCE e-learning strategy continues 'these technologies are also bringing about new approaches in research, libraries and resources and administration' (p.2). Online learning has 'pervasive impacts and changes in other HE functions' (HEFCE, p.2). Thus, e-learning is a transformational process that posits new challenges for staff and students, both in educational methods and support. (0) comments
Web Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Education - Vladan Devedžic, Journal of Educational Technology and Society
This paper surveys important aspects of Web Intelligence (WI) in the context of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research. WI explores the fundamental roles as well as practical impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced Information Technology (IT) on the next generation of Web-related products, systems, services, and activities. As a direction for scientific research and development, WI can be extremely beneficial for the field of AIED. Some of the key components of WI have already attracted AIED researchers for quite some time – ontologies, adaptivity and personalization, and agents. The paper covers these issues only very briefly. It focuses more on other issues in WI, such as intelligent Web services, semantic markup, and Web mining, and proposes how to use them as the basis for tackling new and challenging research problems in AIED. (0) comments
So Much, So Far, So What? Progress and Prediction in Technorhetoric - Bob Whipple, Jr. and Robert S. Dornsife, Jr; Karios
Because technorhetoric* is a recognized academic field (at least to its several hundred practitioners or one level or another, and to those familiar with its scholarship, which appears in major English journals as well as at least 4 online or print journals devoted to it), whose forward-looking nature renders it prone to pronouncements as to how “things will be”, and because it is important to assess any major enterprise by comparing outcomes to original claims, it follows that techno-rhetoricians have been making reflective and summative assertions about the nature of technological writing instruction. Cynthia Selfe (1999), Barbara Blakely Duffelmeyer (2000), and others have specifically called us to look carefully and critically at the implications of what we are doing as teachers of technologized literacy. We should look at the implications of the technology we use; we should “pay attention” (Selfe) to the intended and unintended consequences arising from our uses of technology; we should teach our students to be critical (Duffelmeyer) of the technologies we use and what those technologies imply. (0) comments Online Learning News Blog Archives OTEL - Ray's Home Page - Notebook - UIS Online - U of I Online - UIS Home Fair Use |
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