1. Description of the Seminar (Intention, Participants, Goals)
2. Approach (Schedule, Tools, …)
3. Experiences
4. Findings

Description of the Seminar (Intention, Participants, Objectives)

The Seminar was held at the University of Hamburg during Summersemester 2008. It was intended to be a Seminar for Students of Educational Science from Hamburg and for Students who are in the international MA Programme ePedagogy Design - Visual Knowledge Building located at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki - it’s Students are spread around the whole Globe like in Wey’s Seminar.
Thats why the Seminar was held in english Language and was originally structured in a way that it would be possible to participate with just an internet connection.
After two Seminar Sessions it appears that there where only Students located in Hamburg within this course. Thats why I changed my mind and changed some Sessions from virtual to physical where the students can meet physically in a Seminarroom.

The Aim of this Seminar was that Students know about different forms of eLearning and the advantages and disadvantages of different eLearning types, Plattforms and relations to different Learning types.. Also Students expectations from the seminar should be respected. One of the things the students requested was that they wanted to learn more about the tools which could be used for eLearning or at least to support eLearning.
Two ways where offered to receive credits during this seminar. First Oppurtunity was to create a small eLearning -Object or a “Multi-Media Snippet” where you can learn something and write a Essay about it. The other Option was to write a Portfolio using Blogs. All students decided to write a Blog during this Seminar.

Approach (Schedule, Tools, …)

The Schedule for this Seminar consits of 14 Sessions. The fist session should help the Students and me to get to know each other a little bit more and to figure out what previous knowledge the students had already.
One of the biggest challenges during the seminar might have been to try to define what eLearning is or at least which existing definitions describes it best.
With the help of images we created Groups for a coming up project work. Within this project work small groups where asked to create small eLearning modules to describe typical eLearning Terms, such as LCMS, PLE, … . We spent a lot of time for the Project work because every group needed time should have enough time to explore the own topic, crate a way to present the content/topic and do the presentation for the group and have a chat with the whole group on how they produced it and what they discovered during this process.
One of the results I really like is a Video about what a PLE is produced by Martina and Daniel.
I wanted the students to reflect about how and/or where they’re leaning or doing eLearning thats why we had a session about the personal learning arrangements.
We had one Session which was completely online but synchronus. We used Skype ^TM and Adobe^® Connect ^TM to get together.
Further on we had a On- and Offline Session about learning Theories. The students collected Information about different learning theories in the Wiki and gave short introductions within a presentation. In order to support these Presentation they tried to visualize the learning theories.

Beside Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism we also talked about connectivism.

Below you can see the technical infrastructure of the seminar. The arrows show some of the main communication ways using all the tools. As I said above all Students decided to use a Blog to do their ePortfolio. So I aggregated their Posts with the help of RSS into the Seminar Weblog and added Links to the students Blogs. By doing this every Student had her/his own Plattform to collect own Ideas, Resources and Media and additionally we had a common Blog which had all the Students Posts and the general Course information.


Experiences

Using a Weblog as a centralized Platform, in my eyes was a good decision. It supports a time based structure, just like the seminar has on one hand a time based structure. Tags and Categories offered a way to organize the content in a way that fits into the content related structure. Definitions and other general Information was stored in the wiki, ususally after having a broader collection in all the blogs. We used the Wiki also for collaberative writing what was pretty succesful. To achieve these goals we spend a lot of time for technical questions to get familiar with Blogs, Wikis and al the other tools. I knew these tools before and worked with them and I think this is an important point. A Seminar is not the right place to try tools if they are the main infrastructure in your seminarconcept.
Beside having theoretical Input research during the course the we had a lot of Learning by doing and Lyearning by teaching.
One good example is the Video about PLE’s I mentioned above. The students learned how difficult and time-consuming it can be to create a short video film. I mean not only technically but creating a short storybook for en educational video and discover it contents is one part and the other one is to create the video, dealing with different licenses because of copyright and creative commons, get it online or make it available in other ways. After that process sharing these experiences with the other seminarparticipants was quite a big job.

Findings

In this point I’d like to collect some things I figured out during the Course and/or like to keep in mind when having the next seminars.

1. Working with students is a big joy!
2. Spend some a lot of time to check that technical things work.
3. Students like to have they’r own space in the seminar -On- and Offline.
4. Care about (Students) privacy!
5. Choose only technical tools if they really support your goals!
6. Don’t forget about the content.
7. Try things, be brave but don’t bring your seminar into danger!
8. The teacher or should I say the one who is responsible for the seminar should have a good knowledge about the tools you want to work with.
9. Be creative!
10. Ask for and give a lot of Feedback.
11. Elate your course to work collaborative and share a lot of their information (seems that usually students think it is not ok to share information that much or work together on the same topic).

I am very interested in additions and other comments in any way.

it has been preety quiet here the past few weeks. Sorry for that but I had a lot of work to do followed by great holidays. Now I’d like to share some links with you which might be interesting.

1. 100 Best YouTube Videos for Teachers
2. Presentation: Designing New Learning Landscapes (George Siemens)
3. Twitter in Education Link 1 Link 2
4. 20 Free eBooks About Social Media

May be I missed some important links during the past weeks. Please let me know!

Delivering the cloud to individual students is the key mobile role for education.

The node junction between web assets is the most important component of online learning.

That sounds a lot like George Siemens idea of Connectivism to me.

In her Keynote she presents a

3 Step Plan to complete before 2012

1. No more pencils - mobile and connectivity to all school age kids
2. No textbooks - schools use open educational resources online
3. No more searching gobbledygook - educators and mobilists focus on learning content

Martin Ebners presentation titled “Has the end of chalkboard come? A survey about the limits of Interactive Pen Displays in Higher Education” could be a nice base for evaluating interactive whiteboards within our ePush Project.

| View | Upload your own

That’s it so far. For me it is nice to get these impressions. Thanks a lot to the contributers!

Get it online

One can easily upload different kinds of files to the own webpage to make them available to the students. Usually Slides, Texts, Images, Videos or even a collection of Links are published on websites.

Share

The Web offers a lot of Options to share your Seminar stuff with others on social sharing services. This is helpful to avoid the reinvention of the wheel, to get credits and Feedback from others, even from people who are not within that particular seminar but interested in the topic.

Make it work

Most of those social sharing services do not only offer the storage of files. They usually offer user profiles, categories and tagging for your content. Another very useful feature is the embed function. That means you can upload and store your files on theyr server, but they allow you to copy an embed-code from their page to display the content in your blog/website. And further on to embed slideshows or films into your own website usually means that you can watch them without leaving your website.

How To

1. Find the embed-code (Viddler, Teachertube, Slideshare, Flickr, Scribt, Issuu)
2. Copy it to your Clipboard
3. Go to your Blogpost (change to the code editor if you are in wysiwyg-mode)
4. Paste the code
5. Be happy

Note: Wordpress.com and Edublogs.org sometimes need special code. See their FAQ’s if no special code is offered.
The Screenshots below will show you where to find the embed code.

Services

Video: Viddler, Teachertube
Slides: Slideshare
Images: Flickr
Links: del.icio.us
Text: scribd, issuu

It works like this Video from Teachertube:

ePortfolio Expert Forum

• First John Pallister [Blog] told about his experences in the MOSEP Project and with ePrtfolios in general. After his presentation he asked what our status concerning ePortfolios is yet.

  His answer is:

  The ePortfolio process supports a shift from teaching to learning;
  We are not taking full advantage of the process yet – why not? You will find his presentation in a ePortfolio Google Group. (Note even thoug the presentation has 54 slides he only used the first 14 during his speech. Thank you )

• Thomas Pfeffer (University of Klagenfurt) were talking about Competence Portfolios and Portfolios for Assesment.
• Sieglinde Jakob-Kühn talked about frustrating Experiences with Mahara within the MOSEP Project. As i heard later it was caused by the update from Mahara 0.8 to Version 1.0.
• The last presentation inside this forum was done by Andrea Chrsiten and Martin Hofmann pedagogical University St. Gallen. It dealt with reflecting portfolios and the possibilitis of development of the personality by doing ePortfolio Work. One example was Sarahs Portfolio.

After all that presentations (I hope they will be online soon) there had been a active discussion.

Keynotes

Within the Keynotes there had been the following things interesting for me:

• Graham Attwell of Pontydysgu was talking about the MOSEP Project and the Aims and Issues of ePortfolios.
  Aims
  • Presentation
  • Asessment
  • Planning Aims
  • Personal Learning

  Issues

  • Changes in teaching and learning
  • Who provides te ePortfolio?
  • Who can access the portfolio for what purpose?
  • What should an e-portfolio contain?
  • How do we represent and recognise informal learning

  And he added a final statement which I think one should keep in mind when talking about assesment wit ePortfolios

  Assesment for learning not assesment of learning.

• Another Keynote speaker was Jay Cross. I have to admit that some of his “effects” in the presentation were pretty smart, but alltogether it was’nt that impressing as expected.
  Within his presentation he said learning is based on Comprehension, Conversation and Collaboration.
• The most interesting Keynote was offered in the beginning of the second conference day by Gabi Reinmann. She was talking about Selbstorganisation im Netz – Anstoß zum Hinterfragen impliziter Annahmen und Prämissen.
  Abstract:

  When we talk about “self organization on the web” there is little reflection on the implicit presumptions which underlie discussions and recommendations for self-organized learning in Web 2.0. This article elaborates on three of these premises, namely: (a) It is largely clear what self-organization means. (b) Self-organization is possible for anybody anytime. (c) Self-organization is generally desired. The point is not to dismiss self-organized learning on the interactive web or to argue against the boom of self-organization in the public discourse per se. But there are reasons for advocating more transparency and some thoughtfulness.

  It was one of the very few critical voices but still not strictly avoiding the new options. I really liked that! She was also one of the very few persons who offered her materials online yet. Thank you very much!

Some short things

Within a discussion and a Track Rolf Arnold said some interesting things:

• You can’t make people learning, earning can’t be forced.
• Technology is comfortable. You dont have to write down everything the teacher is saying, you don’t have to be in a specific place to “consume” you learning content.

and he asks an interesting question:

• New Media- New Education?

And another interesting Session was hosted by Steve Wheeler. He was talking about open content and self organisation: using social software to promote collaborative learning. Three points leads him to use social software:

• students should take responsibility for their own learning
• social software offers opportunities for deeper learning
• social software promotes reflective practice

He is working within two projects called Mentorblog & WikiLit Project.

That are the main things which managed their way to my notes. If i missunderstood something or if you have your own review (does’nt matter what langauge) please comment or trackback this post.

Update: EduMedia 2008 - from an ePortfolio and PLTs perspective John Pallsiters review

“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reasons to work with a Blog and Wiki in Seminars

I decided that i’d like to try to work with a weblog-wiki-combination for my seminar as I am always praying telling in my workshops.

1. While I am pretty familar with Blogs and Wikis I thought the students should get in touch with Blog and Wikis more than just comment and read stuff I wrote.
   One reason for that was that I’d like to read a little bit more about their thoughts about the seminar, eLearning and related stuff.
2. Another reason to let the students have their own blog was that I want them to be able to get their content to the web, more or less periodically. To write a Blog is a very easy way to publish information on the net.
3. The main question if you use tools for teaching/learning is to think about why and how you’d like the tools to be used. In my opinion reflection is a very good way to identify future learning goals and recent learning activitys. While a Blog could be used to collect parts of and Links to the Students Work and offers a way to structure and reflect these collections, it seemed to me that using it as a starting point for a ePortfolio would be a good chance.
4. Collecting, organizing and reflecting on stuff from the could be easily done with pencil and paper but there are some important things missing. It is not that easy to cope with Multimedia content an a piece of paper, but yes, you are right, doing a ePortfolio on a Computer offline is no problem, organizing important webressourzes is a little more difficult if your ePortfolio is offline. For me the most important aspect to do your Portfolio online is that you can collaberate, and communicate with others, share your ideas, get feedback, help and motivation from lets say all over the world seems to be impossible if you’re working offline.

I know that doing this ePortfolio with good content and reflection is a lot of work for the Students, but I am sure that it is worth it.

Give Feedback!

To get a little bit more Feedback from “all over the world” I ask you to visit the Blogs of my seminar participants and read what they think about eLearning, how they get along with that and send them your comments. May be there are some interesting Ideas for your personal learning!
Here are the Links:
Daniel
Elena (not much activity yet)
Guerro (not much activity yet)
Hauke
Juliane
Luise
Martina
Samuel
Sascha (not much activity yet)
Selma
Simon
Simone
Susanne

Coming up

The past few weeks the students collected a lot of definitions and quotes about eLearning and related topics in the wiki for this seminar and within the nxt two weeks we will have presentations of little learning objects which should help to get to know what different abbreviations are meaning e.g. PLE, VLE, LCMS, CBT, … or words like Microlearning and so on. All this will be related to formal, non-formal and informal learning and I am pretty sure you can find interesting Articles within the students Blogs.

See also Torsten Meyers Report about this Seminar or Owens 1 2 3 Twitter Collections.