Handcuffs on a 5-year old

You have to see this to believe it. Here is the story with the video tapes.
A 5-year old girl in a kindergarten in St.-Petersburg (Florida) gets hand-cuffed by 3 police officers, after teachers and the principal can not calm her down.
To me, this is a typical situation of an emotional build-up in a child, which just passes if you give it a chance to calm down, by isolating her (a so-called time-out).
But to call in the police and have the child hand-cuffed, is beyond my (European) comprehension.

Edublogs are go! - Short history of (North-American) edublogging

As with all Internet-related activity, the cradle of edublogging is supposedly situated somewhere in the USA, as Australian James Farmer states in this interesting semi-historical article Edublogs are go!, which is to be submitted to the web-based version of the new magazine elearning

Wilfred Rubens TE-learning centrum: technology enhanced learning: Voor- en nadelen (t)e-learning

Wilfred Rubens - another Dutch edublogger - has published an interesting - dutch-language - list of (dis)advantages of (t)e-learning: Wilfred Rubens TE-learning centrum: technology enhanced learning: Voor- en nadelen (t)e-learning
This is an interesting contribution to mention in the presentation that I'll be giving on the use of Digital Learning Environments next month. I also want to suggest to the Elise author team to add this comprehensive (yet short) overview to the Elise-course for next year.

Bblog: The Blackboard Weblog

A weblog with items from the BlackBoard user community. Thanks again to Stephen Downes' OLDaily: Bblog: The Blackboard Weblog

Why Online Teaching Turned Me Off (washingtonpost.com)

Thanks to Stephen Downes' OLDaily weblog, I read this very revealing article from the Washington Post by Susan Sharpe, a teacher who was a CBT-enthousiast in the 1980's but now has a more skeptical perspective on online teaching.
Why Online Teaching Turned Me Off (washingtonpost.com)
A very interesting read, I must say.

A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections - ICT en Onderwijs BLOG

Pierre Gorissen, one of my favourite edubloggers in the Netherlands refers to this interesting overview concerning A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections - ICT en Onderwijs BLOG. This is particularly interesting for the EUREA project.

Critical Computing - the 2005 Aarhus Conference

At the department, we have agreed to start working with PPP's, Personal Publication plans. In the course of developing my own PPP for the next 12 months, I stumbled on this very interesting conference: Critical Computing - the 2005 Aarhus Conference. Now I am considering submitting a paper related to my PhD research to this conference. But the deadline is approaching rapidly, so I'll need to hurry.

AVNet VLIR training

A couple of weeks ago, our department had the pleasure of hosting a small group of staff members from universities from a number of developing countries within the framework of the Vl.I.R. (Flemish Interuniversity Council) I.U.S. programme. The group was given an intensive training course in the development anad production of AudioVisual Learning Materials.
The compilation movie gives a nice overview. On Day 2, Bieke and I presented some ideas for translating learning purposes into choice of media.

edtechNOT.com Website and Blog

In my search for relevant literature with a critical attitude towards technology in the classroom, I stumbled on the work of Larry Cuban & Todd Oppenheimer, through Jim Forde's interesting edtechNOT.com website and recent weblog edtechNOT.com Blog

eLearning reviews

Long time since I posted something. Just can't find the time to keep my Blog up-to-date.
In the midst of my search for rich web-based communication (web-conference, etc.), I am preparing a paper with a critical view on digital learning environments (DLE's) for a seminar with a group of a few hundred high-school headmasters and ICT-co-ordinators, to be organised by REN Vlaanderen in May here in Leuven.

In my search for supporting materials, I stumbled onto www.elearning-reviews.org, a Swiss-based group of researchers who provide reviews on publications within the wide area of eLearning research.
Quite an interesting starting point for research...

Envivio

Today, AVNet was given a demonstration of Envivio webcasting/streaming products by the local Belgian resellers. Impressive, but expensive.

Wanna check out open.ac.uk's XO Backlot solution, developed at their Knowledge Media Institute.

Theory and Practice of Online Learning

Athabasca University offers a 2004 handbook on a Creative Commons license.

"a wonderfully perceptive and complete guide to the theory and practice of online learning." Sir John Daniel, Assistant Director-General for Education, UNESCO

Anderson, T. and F. Elloumi, Eds. (2004). Theory and practice of online learning. Athabasca, Athabasca University.

Webconference & web-presence

In a meeting with Erik Duval last week, he introduced me and my colleagues to two interesting tools that are being developed at the Centre for New Media at the Open University in the UK. These tools are being developed in support of e-learning activiteis. Both tools are developed in Flash, and are therefore platform-independent. All you need is a recent browser, Flash-player 7 (or higher), and a webcam, microphone and speakers/headphones.

• Hexagon is a web-presence tool that allows a number of (international) users to be in virtual rooms and see who else is present.
  
• Flashmeeting is a full-fletched web-meeting tool, that combines audio/video-conferencing, with text-chat, URL-sharing and voting options. One can also choose to have the web-meeting recorded, and then have it stored on a server for later playback.

Neat stuff.

Strategic use of e-Learning in higer education

On the European-Commission-financed portal site elearningeuropa.info there is an interesing interview with dr. Tony Bates about the strategic use of eLearning in higher education.

Predictions for 2005

Always nice to read what specialists predict for the coming year:

- Last year Stephen Downes was tempted into predictions for 2004: "2004: the turning point"
- Recently, he reviewed his predictions in "2004 in the rear view mirror"

- Also this year, he attempts a prediction, albeit in the Lisa Neal's column in eLearn magazine

- A Dutch-language prediction for 2005 can be found in Wilfred Rubens' weblog: "Hoe zal e-learning zich in 2005 ontwikkelen?"

About blogging and RSS

In the Elise course, I have learned about (we)blogging, Wiki and RSS as possibly interesting technologies for e-learning.

RSS
Since that course module, I have installed Mozilla's Firefox as my default browser, partly because it is non-Microsoft and it allows 'tabbed' browsing, but mainly because it integrates RSS-functionailty in the form of 'Live bookmarks'. This means that the 10 most recent RSS-feeds are available from a pull-down menu.

I have also replaced Netscape Messenger by Mozilla's Thunderbird, for similar reasons. The RSS-feeds in Thunderbird are treated like e-mails, which allows one to store them locally, search them, and use them as a personal knowledge base.

The advantage of RSS - dubbed by some as the 'Next killer app for education' - has the advantage that each individual Internet-user can subscribe to content that he is interested in, without having to go look for it. For example, I keep track of what is happening at my old university, what is happening in my region of the country, etc. Even commercial information aggregation services, such as My Yahoo! now allow one to add RSS feeds to your personal pages, thus allowing you to keep track of your information, even when you're using a public computer.

(We)blog
(We)blogging is a technology (or a service) that allows you to write your personal online diary. You can use a weblog to share personal thoughts, poetry, pictures (so-called photo-blogs) or even audio (so-called podcasting). Even serious media, such as the quality newspaper 'De Standaard' have a weblog. There is quite some interest for the educational use of weblogging, for example for student portfolios.

(We)blogging and RSS are often combined, thus allowing one to keep track of people's personal thoughts or interesting discoveries. A landmark in this area is Stephen Downes's site.

Well, that's it for now.

Networking

First of all: Best wishes for 2005!

Spent a large part of the past few days further developing my network within the LinkedIn environment. LinkedIn is an online service that allows you to connect to people that you know, have worked with or are working with. The larger your 'virtual' network becomes, the more opportunities you have of finding people who are doing relevant work (either in research, consultancy or implementation) that could be of interest to you.
Check it out! It's free.

New eLearning projects

Most of the week, I have been preparing for the new eLearning R&D projects that will be starting in January 2005:

• "REVE - Real Virtual Erasmus", co-ordinated by Europace.
  

• "Victorious - Virtual Curricula Through Reliable InterOperating University Systems", co-ordinated by the Coimbra Group of universities.

• "e-LERU, creation of a virtual LERU campus", co-ordinated by the League of European Research Universities.

• And finally, "EUREA - European Meta databases of E-Academic resources", also co-ordinated by the League of European Research Universities.

My department is partner in each of the 4 projects. The first three projects will be co-financed by the eLearning programme of the European Commission, whereas the fourth will be co-financed within the eContent programme.

We're also interviewing people who will be working as research assistants in these projects.

Interesting sites and references

Done some surfing yesterday and today and came up with some interesting sites:

• Instructional Design Models, a comprehensive overview of different models of instructional design.
• An interesting book by some of people at OU in the Netherlands: Integrated e-Learning: Implications for Pedagogy, Technology and Organization
• Finally, I also got my hands on a paper bij Van Merriënboer, with his model of the four-component instructional design system. Hope I find time to read it.
  

Commercial vs. OpenSource (bis)

Earlier I reported that one of the Flemish Universities decided to move from BlackBoard to Dokeos. This week, also the students at my own University decided that the current BlackBoard implementation just isn't good enough. In the students' weekly magazine, they argue for a profoud evaluation of the current system, ans they are especially concerned with a) some aspects of user-friendliness of the interface, b) the link with external dabases, and c) the 'inappropriate use' of the environment by teaching staff. You can find the (dutch) text of the article here.
To be continued, I guess (and secretly hope)...