Flashbacks of our E-Learning Seminar?

Here is a presentation I’ve found on a blog-site concerned with English teaching materials: The English Blog. I had some “dé jàvu” experiences, when watching it…

Do you share my impression?

The video is introduced as a “video in the style of Common Craft which does an excellent job of defining connectivism and showing how students can build a learning network.”

Well, enjoy this flashback on our work in the past semester, recollecting connectivism and other images…

Good Luck to everybody!

Positive Connotations

On rereading of my text and my other texts in the blog I must agree with Theresa’s comment, that a lot of my experience presented there  is negative. My posts are quite pessimistic. Hmmm…

I suppose I could explain it also with the behaviorist theory of learning: according to it you learn by reacting to outside stimuli. Thus, my reactions show constantly the need of improving, the need for new correcting stimuli. However, I did not take into account that positive feedback is also necessary for all learning participants. I tend to forget or oversee the positive sides… This is maybe not exactly behaviorism, but certainly it belongs to the learning theory, that to see the positive effects of one’s work gives extra motivation.

So here are my constructive and motivating remarks:

1. The E-Learning seminar was a kind of seminar, about which I wrote in the previous post that I was missing it. It showed a lot of ideas to organise learning space and to make the best possible use of the new media.

2. I would propose to arrange this type of seminar as a learning-tool-introduction for all students – not only of the pedagogics.

3. Personally I spent a lot of very productive time in internet and learnt a lot by practicing the hints from the seminar.

4. I liked the constructivist seminar form: we were not given the ready made instructions or solutions – we had to find answers ourselves. Yet we had lots of hints and help tips from our seminar leading coaches.

5. My kids have started blogs in WordPress, and I have found many interesting learning websites, once I have felt more competent about computer usage.

Therefore, thanks a lot!

A Day of Learning Theories

Every day spent at the university – attending seminars or preraring for them – is in a way a day with learning theories. I use them in my practical learning process. I use them when teaching (this means supporting my kids in their school issues for the time being).

Yesterday, trying to think about the particular theories involved, observing my own learning and the way I practice learning with my children, I had to admit that almost the only theory I use is behaviorism. The old, traditional methods of learning are  the ones I was confronted with in my school days, and the ones that drilled for a long time are very hard to verify.

Unforunataly my knowledge of the more recent and possibly more effective (as related by the scholars) theories of learning take a lot of time to be innerly accepted and practically applicable. Sometimes I wish there were courses preparing the sudents to work  according to the different learning methods, where the practical bennefits and drawbacks could be shown. Of course, I know that this is to be taught in the gymnasium, but the theories and thus practical methods change so quickly. It is a pity not to have an access to the development  in this field once you are out of school.

In my learning, based practically on theoretical recognitions of behaviorism my knowledge has to be imprinted in my mind, which serves as a kind of archive units container. My learning aim is to gather as much of information in my mind’s safe as possible. This is probably  the root of the very negative frustration about my learning process: the evidence of the possibilities of my mind’s storage is far from satisfying! My educational means and  sources, e.g., books, learning media, classroom activities, are in the so arranged process of learning, authorities I take for granted. There is, of course, an element of my own reflection, yet my own judgement and criticism are not primary in aquiring my knowledge. I rely to a great extent on the authority of the external material I’m confronted with.

Constructivist learning, for a change, would be marked by extended practicing of one’s own judging critical skills of external sources. Competence in relying on own inner sense of validity of educational material makes carrying an extensive encyclopedia in your mind redundant. You don’t have to contain all knowledge if you can properly judge the particular situation and know where to look for the details. Thus,  learning is more effective, according to conscructionalists, when the learner is allowed to create his own world of knowledge, marked by his own connections between the elements. The learning aim is here to set the connections in the mind, or  to become aware of them, instead of jamming knowledge in the brain box. The teaching/learning material is viewed only as raw material, the instructor is not an unshakable authority, but an accompanying  coach to help over major difficulties. The feedback he gives is not to provide the learner with the external information, but to better the  regulation process of  his  inner transformations (or creations).

So far the theory. I’m inclined to believe that it works once you’ve got the methods running. Yet there is time necessary to get the new method running, which I personally do not have. Possibly it is short sighted not to invest time in the rearrangement of learning – but… I’m chairing a seminar session tommorow and there’s still work to be done about it: schemes, details, information in reserve. Then there are only 5 weeks to write some seminar papers, and a lot of reading stuff bound to it, too! I’d love to learn more effectively, but how do I push the learning of more effective learning in the tight time schedule yet?

Well, bye bye – till tommorow!  Off I am for the next seminar… hopefully setting some staying connections in my mind…

P.S. writing off this blog entry took two hours time…

Pioneering Online Team-Working

During today’s session I felt like taking part in a scientific experiment, the results of which might take an influence on the development of the future education patterns. Certainly we are not the first ones to lead an online-seminar, but we belong to the pioneers…

There were several organisational issues to be settled first, before diving into the learning content of the session. Settling those initial questions was both vital and fascinating, so that the organisation and not the extra content became the essence of our e-meeting. But it supossedly should be so: you cannot grow the carrots, if the soil is not prepared…

Having in mind that the future online sessions will possibly be directed not only at instructing about the “know-how”  of this type of education, I would like to present my points of consideration about our today’s experience:

1. It was difficult for me  to concentrate on the oral (and visual) presentations of the leading persons, while controlling the Skype-chat at the same time. I was fascinated by Anja’s ability to give a lecture – talking and showing on the screen -  and her simultanous reading of Skype-questions and tipping of the answers to the questions!  On my part, I must say, I tried to be, see and hear everything, but at the same time I had the impression that I’m leaving out unnoticed important parts.

My proposition: Maybe the session leader (or the lecturer) could take a break from time to time,  make some comments on the chat issues, and then go ahead. This way the participants will be able to concentrate on listening to the presentation without necessarily missing the written comments of the others. Anyway, it was great to experience us disciplined enough not to talk simultanously all together!

2. The presentation screen in the Adobe meeting-space was to small. It was quite inconvenient that we couldn’t actually read the indicated texts, but mostly take guesses as to the shown material of the web-sites (“delicious” in our particular case). So generally,  the technical tools  demand still some improvement…

Anyhow, the idea of such online working is definitely great and deserves developing!  And I’m very glad that I could participate in this project.

Thank you all for the fascinating learning stuff!

Part 3: Final Creation of CBT Presentation

I decided to put the information about CBT, which I could gather, on slides in a powerpoint presentation. The ready pruduct is embedded via Slideshare in my blog.

My presentation isn’t exactly what was ment to examplify the idea of a short audio-visual e-learning unit similar to the model ones on our seminar site. My product isn’t self-sufficient: it desires extra explanations, and has no cute images combining several ideas in a single piece – like the one of the parted cake in the microlearning presentation we saw in one of our sessions. The result of my work demands the cooperation of ears more than eyes, and its usefulness for the process of learning is unfortunately restricted to the classroom space. It is in this sense not a sufficient e-learning tool.

The presentation was originally planned as more of a self-standing learning help. Unfortunately I couldn’t overcome shortcomings of my technical competence of computer and internet operating. The short videos I prepared to demonstrate creating on on’s own CBTs didn’t go within the powerpoint presentation, though embedding videos in PPPs is theoretically possible. I created the videos with a screencasting program Screen Movie Studio, of which I downloaded a trail version. It was easy to save the videos on my computer, but it proved to be complicated to place them somewhere else. I signed up for YouTube and tried to draw the videos into my account, but YouTube coudn’t convert the videos, either. I wondered whether it was caused by the volume of the film: three minutes of a screencast took more than 1GB space. So I tried to convert the short films via Windows Movie Maker and then via Nero Video creating tool, which resulted in small volume films (several MBs only). Yet it brought no improvement as far as implanting the videos by YouTube is concerned.  Sorry,  that is the  standpoint of my efforts by now…

Finally, I want to remark, that although I find the ten advices in the “Ten minutes to improve your e-learning”-video very interesting,  my experience tells me that none of the there proposed ideas can be fullfilled within 10 minutes…  Selecting material from internet for any stage of creation of any actual project is very, very time comsuming and thus to me (but maybe this is my wrong attitude) very frustrating.

Tumult in the Pedagogical Faculty

Hallo Everybody,

I also couldn’t join you today, but I’m just reading the articles Ralf posted yesterday (I didn’t visit our page yesterday!). See you!

Part 2: Jeefo (computer virus)

Installing  CBT

CBT products have to be installed on computer. Therefore,  the utility of a software CD cannot be proved  straight away by checking its contents (compared to checking the book contents). The installing of every CD (chosen by my kids and me from the library) took a couple of minutes or more in every separate case. Only then we could start the software and decide whether we liked it or not.  This necessarily prolonged introduction to the actual usage of our CBT test-products was already on the boundry of my kids’  patience.

Then, there appeared a different problem: my computer didn’t want to install the CDs at all. This was quite frustrating, of course.

Only shortly before my final classroom presentation I discussed this problem with a friend of mine, who suggested she could talk to my computer about its various sorts of unwillingness. This sounded interesting enough for me, since talking to a computer is just one of the things I mostly miss about this whole wonderful technological development of our age…

After an initial look at the malfunctioning elements she scanned my computer for viruses using a free Norton Scan program. There – surprise, surprise – it came out  that my computer is infected with a Jeefo virus, which attacks data of the “.exe” type. To learn how to get rid of Jeefo my friend asked for information in Wikipedia and Google. We could find there technical data and removal tips. We downloaded one of freeware disinfector specialised in this particular virus and were almost succesful in removing it: unfortunately the most important file -  svchost.exe – could not be disinfected. It cannot be deleted, which we could find out just by asking a direct question: “can I delete svchost.exe?” in the address space of my internet server.

After major disinfecting of my computer all the minor – but valid – problems I had with it disappeared: my printer works without breaks and I can again easily switch from German to Polish keyboard. I can use my digital slideshow creating programm and I can install learning software from CDs!

Now that I tried to track back the way my friend “talked ” to my computer it was not that easy to put all the needed information together. But once I’ve done it I’m leaving it here for you – for anyone who is having problems with his computer and discovers a Jeefo virus on it.

To summarize the lesson I’ve learnt and I’m trying to leave here: although the computers themselves cannot talk it is wonderful that their users can leave a track of their problems and their solution seeking process, so that the next ones meeting the same problems have a shorter searching way to go through.

Part 3: The making of CBT Presentation

1. Beginning

We started our project in a rather traditional way: research on information. Much as I appreciate  short educational videos which Ralf gathered for us on his and seminar´s pages,  I didn´t know the tools to produce such visualised presentation and had no ideas to fill it with. Also Theresa needed some background information.  Just an ordinary beginning…

2. What is CBT and Tutoring?

We followed these questions and looked up books in the library,  searched on internet pages, created the content outline for our presentation. The subject grew, we decided to split the research work:  I took  CBT, Theresa took care of Tutoring. At this stage of the project I experienced the serendipidity effect, I was talking about when introducing the project in the seminar. Reading, following hypertexts, distracted by the ads and pictures I landed sometimes somewhere online, where the connection to my primary subject was gone and lost forever…

3. Looking for examples

Of course I was using learning software without knowing it is CBT previously. At the school start I bought some German, English and Maths CDs for my kids. Very soon I realised this was a waste of money – the CDs were running for two, three weeks and became completely uninteresting afterwards. But I found a good substitute: public libraries are offering a lot of teaching/learning material to be used on the fashionable (I thought at the beginning, knowing by now they are very progressive, too) computers. This time, for the sake of the CBT project, we borrowed quite a lot of CDs to support primary school subjects and adult learning, as well. My kids and I picked  samples  of differnt sorts and wanted to apply them on our computer evaluating thier utility for our personal interests.

4. Technical obsticles

Comparing to a book which you start reading just by opening the first page (on condition that you can read) or to television programes you can watch just by switching on the television, it is not that simple to start a computer software on your PC. It  may happen that you put a very interesting looking, very promising program to check the knowledge of the earth and space geography, and your computer cannot start it, because it is not compatible with the operating system of the computer. So unless you have several computers at store, supplied with old and recent versions of Microsoft systems, you´d better watch out and check the compatibility right before you decide how interesting the content happens to be. This was my first technical lesson connected to a lot of disappointments for my kids.

to be continued…

CBT Presentation

End of the Year Mood/CBT Presentation Stages

So, everybody´s on vacation still…

no news from Sascha, no news from Ralf… I can´t find the presentations on LMS.

I did find, however Mirjam´s PLE, and Ole´s Presentation. I suppose I will not be able to create my own webpage like Ole´s, but I would like to find out how to embed my powerpoint-presentation on CBT, which will soon be ready, into my blog. This procedure is still very unclear to me. I´ll try to use Slideshare next, and see what happens then – I will be very much obliged if the LMS group could answer my conmment to their groupwork account from Dec. 10.

The ellaborated details of the research on our group´s project, which will be used in my and Theresa´s presentations, are to be found on our wiki-page.

Hope to hear from someone in our seminar soon!