Category: Educational

Laptops vs. Computer labs

Several in the blogosphere have pointed to the Ars Technica report this week about the decision of the University of Virginia to re-think computer labs, after only 4 new students arrived sans computer (didn’t state if they were laptops or desktops). Naturally, the reaction was mixed – mostly anti the decision; based on aspects such…

Teaching with Twitter

  • Author By Emma
  • Publication date March 18, 2009
  • Categories: eLearning

A whole range of ideas from Steve Wheeler for Teaching with Twitter. I can see several having uses here. There are also links to others who’ve experimented with Twitter for teaching….

Simple English Wikipedia

  • Author By Emma
  • Publication date February 16, 2009
  • Categories: Educational

I’ve seen a few references to the Simple English Wikipedia recently, so thought I’d have a look. They’re recommending that writers use Ogden’s Basic English when writing. I’ve had a look through the list – and there are a lot (as perhaps expected) of similarities with the Makaton Core Vocab (though I can’t quite remember…

Blooms Taxonomy & Second Life

Rex Heer from Iowa State University (Thursday Xu in Second Life) has created a very useful resource – it covers Blooms Taxonomy – and how SecondLife can be used to cover the different levels of learning that Bloom identifies. It’s also a really good example in itself of what can be done within SL!…

An absolutely riveting online course

  • Author By Emma
  • Publication date February 5, 2009
  • Categories: eLearning

Jim Henry lists Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching. Henry starts out with the comments that many of those teaching online would far rather not be – and often don’t feel they have the expertise to do so. The principles listed are: The online world is a medium unto itself. In the online world…

Video lectures from the world's top scholars

Academic Earth claims to have Video lectures from the “world’s top scholars”. While, in many ways, I agree, they’ve only (at present) got those from US universities – so have eliminated all non English speakers, as well as those English speakers from, well, anywhere that’s not the US! The computer science strand has 13 sets…

Debategraph

Someone called “Debategraph” started following me on Twitter, so I thought I’d investigate a little. I’ve now found his (or her!) home page. It’s an interesting idea – seems to be related mind maps. The default one was on Obama (with a link to the Independent – wonder if they use them quite a bit)…