Thursday, October 23, 2008

Beyond the Theoretical Impasse: Extending the applications of Transactional Distance Theory


Education is everybody’s business – the individual, the organisation, and the nation state.

Quality assurance, following the instructional design ADDIE model process, is at the heart of distance education policy development and becomes crucial in contributing towards making distance provision globally competitive, portable across borders, and finally in protecting consumers of education.

The premise of this article is that the Transactional Distance Theory (TDT) should be accepted as a global theory for the further development of distance education.

This Sunday, 26th October, have Coffe with Gavin Dudeney in Second Life


This is just a quick announcement about a free event in Second Life for 'EDUCATORS' on Sunday 26th October at GMT = 18.00 (GMT is 7 hours ahead of Second Life time, so that's 11.00 to 12.00 PDT) world.

You can watch the show and/or join in the discussion. Just go to Edunation III and click the sign-up terminals or email Gavin at dudeney@theconsultants-e.com.

This event is free, but limited to only 100 places.

As an educator in learning, this is a great opportunity to discover and learn Second Life.

It will be an informal event while providing plenty of opportunity to ask questions and find out more about the work of one of the main innovators of ELT and "teacher training" in Second Life. You'll also be able to find out a bit more about some of the free educational tools Gavin has been developing for use in Second Life for your classroom.

If you don't have a Second Life avatar but would like to know how to set one up, download instructions from here. Setting up a Second Life Avatar

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Knowledge Mapping

Authors Fisher, Wandersee and Wideman offer an insightful study on variations of knowledge mapping (relating to learning) titled; "Enhancing cognitive skills for meaningful understanding of domain specific knowledge."

Saturday, October 11, 2008

IEEE Learning Technology Studies

IEEE publishes several learning studies in 2007 relating to eLearning and multimedia applications in the educational environment.

Friday, October 10, 2008

An Interactive Course on Instructional Methods for Future Faculty


This paper discusses how and why training graduate students for future careers as instructors of undergraduate level courses is an important and often neglected aspect of graduate school.

The New Literacies: Research on Reading Instruction with the Internet and Other Digital Technologies


This paper explores the nature of new literacies that build upon traditional reading and writing experiences and explains why these new literacies are central to our children's future. It suggests we must begin to include the literacies associated with the Internet in a broader definition of what it means to become literate.

Results Using Animated Speaking Characters (Avatars) from Testing.

Engaging Site Visitors, in an early 2005 report, displays test results using Animated Speaking Characters (Avatars)conducted by Web Marketing Today, March 9, 2005. While this data is somewhat outdated, it does show an early response to the use of animated characters that can be applied to eLearning courseware today.

Virtual Babyz: Believable Agents with Narrative Intelligence


This paper, by Andrew Stern, describes the interactive narrative experiences in Babyz, an interactive entertainment product for the PC currently in development at PF Magic / Mindscape in San Francisco. As you may conclude from reading this paper, when implementing Babyz it was found to expedient borrowing techniques from many different disciplines, including artificial intelligence, artificial life, videogames, improvisational acting, and traditional cartoon animation.