Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Free is good--Web 2 good!


Jane Hart is a Social Media and Learning advisor. She has a long track record of helping business and education understand how new technologies can be used for learning as well as to improve job and business performance and implement them successfully in their organizations.

She conducts yearly surveys for the past several years asking learning professionals what tools they use. From this, she has compiled her list of the "Top 25" free tools that we all should become more familiar. Check out these 25 Free Tools selected for educator knowledge and use.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

A neomillennial learning approach: Helping non-traditional learners studying at a distance



This paper reports on research investigating the perceptions of first year distance education students studying a foundation communications course using a multimodal learning environment. It demonstrates higher levels of engagement are possible when a neomillennial learning approach is adopted for designing course materials catering to a diverse student body, whilst maintaining a balanced environment for more traditional learners.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web

Compelling and thought provoking data presented in this article illustrates the current process of using digital libraries with a typical workflow, and highlight problems with managing data and metadata using URIs. They then examined a range of new applications such as Zotero, Mendeley, Mekentosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteULike, Connotea, and HubMed that exploit the Web to make these digital libraries more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places with conclusions in how these applications may begin to help achieve a digital defrost, and discuss some issues that will help or hinder in terms of making libraries on the Web warmer places in the future, becoming resources that are considerably more useful to both humans and machines.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

E-Learning Needs Assessment Whitepaper


There are four basic objectives for conducting an e-learning needs assessment:
• Isolate specific business challenges, problems and opportunities for which e-learning is a potential solution.
• Identify risks associated with pursuing and not pursuing e-learning.
• Determine risk management strategies that can be implemented.

This vendor whitepaper considers possible e-learning configurations that represent potential solutions.

This needs assessment is centered on the various business issues that you will identify in question #1, and effectively flush out the remaining questions. It should assist your focus to e-learning initiatives on core business needs, develop a strong business case, and assist you in creating a requirements document (examples) that will aid in vendor evaluation and selection process.

Going Virtual! Unique Needs and Challenges of K-12 Online Teachers


This professional publication offers an insight to the unique needs and challenges K-12 online teachers face in the virtual world.