Archive for the 'ideas' Category

Students reflecting on their TAFE experience…

Published
by
Michael
on 1/9/2005
in ideas, learning and tafe
. 3 Comments

It’s interesting to do a Technorati tag search for TAFE and see what people are writing about their TAFE experience… of course, it’s not always going to be posititve… One student, ‘unwritten’ wrote recently in a post entitled “bored *sigh*“:

Man, i should really get going on my TAFE work, but tis soo soo soo boring, ive been trying to put it off for as long as i can. I mean seriously, this is what we have to do: we have about an A4 sized, 111 paged text book, yea i know it doesnt seem long but we have to summarise each frikkin paragraph of the whole thing! I mean tell me how were supposed to actually learn from that?

Tell me if im wrong and overreacting, PA-LEASE. Cos I sure as hell am learning nothing from it…

…i confronted him about it and the reason he sets the courses up like this is so we fill up the time requirement which is like 40 horus on each module. I mean COME ON! Thats no excuse, it makes me so frustrateddd!!
GRRRR…

Continue reading ‘Students reflecting on their TAFE experience…’

Ideas for promoting a Web Course at TAFE

Published
by
Michael
on 5/5/2005
in General and ideas
. 1 Comment

Over the past few years we haven’t done any specific promotion for our Website Design course here at Wentworth Falls TAFE. I guess during the IT boom of the late nineties/early naughties there wasn’t any need to promote Website Design courses… the demand for web designers/developers was incredible - but that’s not the case now.

There are plenty of people who can “whack a website together” for a small business - and we see examples of this all the time. Much rarer are people who can plan, communicate, design and implement a quality web site, even if it’s only a simple website. But to be honest, small businesses don’t always need a “quality website”, they just want a website with a simple contact form and a bit about the business… and most people have a friend or family member who can put such a website together for them. Larger companies offering Internet Technology / Ecommerce roles are few and far between up here in the Blue Mountains, so my question is:

Who should we be targetting for the Cert IV in Website Design here in the Mountains? Who can benefit most from this qualification?

From the past two years here at TAFE, I reckon I can generalise two or three main roles that the Web Design course caters for at present - maybe you could pick out some more?:

  1. those who have a personal project that they would like to implement themselves.
  2. those who are wanting to learn Web Design to start their own business.
  3. those who are already working in the industry (either in their own business or part of another small business), but would like a qualification.
  4. Students who are looking to broaden their options but aren’t really sure of the direction they want to take. (Jude’s additional point)

I’d guess that 70% of our participants over the past 2 years have been those with a personal project. There are still some who are really keen to start their own business, but only two people (that I’ve known) who are already working in the industry and wanting the qualification (or to upgrade/refresh their skills).

What does this tell us? Where should we focus? What type of course should we offer? I’m not certain, but I can think of two directions we could take (or possibly both).

Direction 1
One option might be to publicise a flexible program or traineeship to people in the mountains already working in the industry. There are quite a few small businesses/individuals working designing sites, but it’s obviously a limited number. I think Colin, my Manager, tried this once but came up against some barriers.

Direction 2
The only other opiton I can think of is to publicise/market a flexible Web program not focused on the qualification, but on helping people research, learn, plan, design and implement their ideas for websites/web applications. I only mention this because there seems to be lots of people wanting to do this - it’s not necessarily helping to get people working in the industry and therefore probably not an option unless it was a commercial course?

Any other ideas/thoughts?

A guide to blended Learning in the knowledge era…

Published
by
Michael
on 22/3/2005
in General, ideas and projects
. 13 Comments

Blended learning, a principle that has been around longer than e-learning or the Internet, has a simple definition of employing multiple approaches when teaching or learning. Yet with the advent of the Learning Management Systems (LMS), in practice many institutions have adopted the term to imply a combination of face-to-face activities and structured activities within an LMS environment.

As George Siemens argues:

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are often viewed as being the starting point (or critical component) of any elearning or blended learning program. This perspective is valid from a management and control standpoint, but antithetical to the way in which most people learn today.

With this understanding many educators on the frontier of online learning are experimenting with the use of more learner-centred tools such as blogs, wikis and news aggregators together with activities focusing on the active construction of the learner’s knowledge – empowering the learner. Yet these new tools can seem inaccessible to many facilitators and learners due simply to the different nature of the tools and a lack of established ideas for using them within learning activities. Even worse, facilitators can venture to try blogging in class but be turned off because of a negative experience (low student involvement). Even those of us who are familiar with the tools often struggle to use them in ways that engage our learners in the active construction of learning (well, I do anyway!).

Wouldn’t it be great to provide a dynamic resource for facilitators who are used to centralised information sources to ease their transition towards the distribution of free tools available now and in the future?

The idea:

To set up an infrastructure for a collaboratively-built online resource called “A guide to Blended Learning in the Knowledge Era.” (ideas for better names!?) This resource will be aimed at providing an easy transition for facilitators who might be wary of using the new tools (such as blogs, wikis and news aggregators), enabling them to have fun learning the new tools themselves while also suggesting lots of fun ideas for using the tools with their students. As facilitators become more confident using the distributed tools currently available they will hopefully become less dependent on this centralised resource (having established their own distributed feeds for learning). Yet at the same time these facilitators will be in a position to contribute back to the resource for those yet to make the transition - updating it with the new tools and strategies that they have gone on to discover!

With the fast-changing landscape of available tools this resource will only be worthwhile if it is able to keep pace with the changes - and this itself will only be possible if it is developed collaboratively from a wealth of experience larger than any one organisation can provide. Furthermore, for educators throughout the industry to see it as worthwhile to contribute some time and effort to such a free resource, I think the material contributed would have to be published under a Free For Education or Creative Commons license so that contributors can be certain that they will always have access to the resource that they helped to build.

The underlying technology…

The technologies that this resource could be based on include open-source Content Management Systems such as Drupal, Mambo or CivicSpace that all allow a wealth of online contributors to create the resource collaboratively. There are other Wiki tools that I’d like to check out, such as Wikipedia’s MediaWiki, but we need to evaluate which CMS is best suited to the task (for example, I think it needs to be easy to update without using special Wiki tags). I noticed that Drupal has a module for collaborative book or documentation writing and looks impressive all-round, so I might install it soon and check it out first.

Aims/Outcomes (incomplete)

My main outcome would be to:

  • Implement an infrastructure to support the collaborative generation of “A guide to blended learning in the knowledge era”

Other related outcomes that I’d be happy to be part of, as long as I’m not stepping on anyone else’s turf:

  • Collaboratively generate a resource of fun activities based on sound learning strategies for introducing new free tools to learners (both students and facilitators).
  • (edited according to Roisin’s comments) building teachers’ capacity to transform their teaching approaches to enable the development of engaging, community driven and technology-rich blended learning environments.
  • ensuring that copyright is strictly adhered to.
  • Involve users of the resource in the creation of new content as they discover new tools or applications or activities in their area of expertise.
  • ??

I’m planning this resource to compliment/support the possible Learnscope team project “Continuous Learning with Evolving Free and Open Source Software” headed by Maria Trevaskis, which is hoping to trial free and open source software in at least 4 industry areas as part of delivery of courses for students in 2005, but I’m hoping it might compliment other projects that people are working on (esp. people in the TALO community, given how formative the discussions there have been!). Hopefully this resource won’t be conflicting with any Learnscope projects - I was told that Learnscope is focused around Professional Development rather than resource development. I’m just keen to set up the infrastructure and get the ball rolling and am happy to support the needs of other projects.

So, what’s your reaction? Why would/wouldn’t you contribute to this resource? Do you know of something like the collaborative resource described that is already setup? Do you think this resource will be valuable in helping facilitators to make the transition to the new tools (and hence help their students to use them too)? Basically, is it worth setting up this infrastructure? Let me know below!

Beyond the Learning Management System

Published
by
Michael
on 5/12/2004
in General, ideas and learning
. 1 Comment

Seems to me there’s been a whole bunch of articles and blogs lately putting forward the idea that the LMS will be a thing of the past… well not exactly, but perhaps not so… central to student learning.

After arguing that we’ve been pursuing systems to impose bureaurocratic control rather than empower the learner, Parkin’s argues on his blog that:

Learning software vendors still doggedly pursue their vision of reusable learning objects that integrate via a central standards-conformant LMS. Meanwhile, trainers who really want to encourage experience-sharing and dynamic learner-created content are scrambling to understand blogging, RSS, and peer-to-peer networks.

Many LMS vendors don?t ?get? learning. Can it really be that they don?t ?get? the internet either? Are they so afraid of being non-intermediated that they will fight real progress every step of the way or are they about to help us evolve?

I came across Parkin’s article above, from an elearningspace.org article “Learning Management Systems: the wrong place to start learning” (which I found from Leigh’s blog). In this article, George Siemens argues that (from the intro):

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are often viewed as being the starting point (or critical component) of any elearning or blended learning program. This perspective is valid from a management and control standpoint, but antithetical to the way in which most people learn today.

In this article George is not arguing that LMSs are bad, but just pointing out their disadvantages - they are Learning Management systems, not necessarily effective Learning Environments.

The more I think about these arguments, the more I think that a Technology course (such as Website Design) should empower learners through the use of freely available distributed tools (e.g. www.blogger.com) to continue learning after the formal course ends. Just need to find out how we can use a good combination of blogging, websites and LMSs.

Teaching Website Design

Published
by
Michael
on 23/11/2004
in General, ideas and reflection
. 6 Comments

As second semester 2004 is drawing to a close, I find myself experiencing (yet again) the frustration of “last-minute learning” in my Web Design class - and I want to do something about it for next semester.

The problem

The more I think about it, the complete process of designing and implementing a website for a client is really only learned during the last few weeks as the students race to get their Client site finished before the end of semester. It’s during these weeks that the first real Client Documentation is prepared, Information Architectures are designed for the first real situation, MS Project Plans are created for the first real project etc. I think this is due to the linear fashion with which we currently teach all the material (with practical assignments and workshops along the way of course!), until towards the end of the semester when students focus primarily on their client projects. But I’m wondering whether a more iterative learning cycle would be more effective and perhaps more student-centred… for example…

Gene, who teaches parts of the course with Jude and me, came up with the great idea at the end of last semester of using some of the modules that she facilitates (Instructional Design / communications) as a “mini” client project, giving students a small taste of the whole project cycle before their major assessment - their real client project. We tried this approach this semester and I think it worked well for the scope that we gave it: students got a taste of a mock client interview and both Gene and I were able to assess most students on their HTML/CSS/Instructional design skills early in the semester. Yet I think I missed the opportunity to use this mini project as an introduction to the complete web design lifecycle (for example, I could have also introduced information architecture, documenting the design, performance testing, accessibility testing etc.)

The idea

Jude and I had a chat the other day about the possibility of a more iterative (or cyclic?) learning process for the students, where they go through the complete lifecycle two or three times during the semester (this was probably Gene’s original idea!). For example,

  1. during the first 2-3 weeks while learning the fundamentals of XHTML and CSS, we could begin the first mini project: planning, designing and implementing our own website. This mini project would include everything from a small MS Project plan, a (brief) information architecture, design, documentation, implementation, performance and accessibility testing.
  2. During the implementation phase of the first mini project, we could begin the planning and interviews for the second mini project: the instructional design site. Again going through the complete lifecycle (perhaps in more depth or with more restrictions on accessibility/performance?)
  3. During the implementation phase of the second mini project, students could begin the planning/interviews for their actual client project - again going through the whole lifecycle (but this time, hopefully on their own).

Of course, as new skills are learned, students would be (hopefully) updating and maintaining their own websites.

But that’s too much work!

… I hear you saying! And perhaps it is impossible to do this without packing more work into an already bulging course - which I want to avoid at all costs. But perhaps it is possible to do without increasing the workload. For example, we could provide strong scaffolding (in the form of templates) for the documentation, project plan and testing cycle for the first mini project, so really students would be filling in the blanks while learning the ropes. Some of the scaffolding could then be removed for the second mini project and finally taken down completely for the final client project. Similarly, the first mini-project would just introduce many of the techniques/skills without going into much depth, the second could build on those and introduce more depth, while the client project would ideally contain little new learning (probably impossible in practice).

I think this structure would enable us to continue developing the self-paced learning strategies that we’ve used this semester and may even enable further flexibility in terms of blended delivery (once the scaffolding/templates and other resources for the mini-projects have been created/updated).

Any comments or criticisms? Can you see any other ways that this might be helpful or unhelpful for the modules that you teach? Or, if you are a student, does the problem description above fairly describe the situation you are now in and do you think this iterative structure would have been helpful or unhelpful for your learning?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!