Archive for the ‘eLearning’ Category

What’s in it for me?

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

DecissionSteve Wheeler pointed in his blog post “Hanging in there” out some really good points. He posted “…informal learning is more reliant upon an individual’s intrinsic motivation than it is by any external pressures. In other words, we learn because we are interested.”
I couln’t agree more with that! But how to “create” that interest? Or better how is the interest in informal learning different from the one in formal learning? Is it the relation to the content? So that directly relation to the content causes intrinsic motivation (the chinese girlfriend) and an indirect relation (good grades lead to a good job leads to a good pay … some day) needs an extrinsic motivation?

Could it be possible for somebody to improve his motivation by creating intrinsic motivation, just by finding a way of directly relating the learning content to one self? That would imply to be very creative in order to relate any given topic to a current living situation.

But how to achieve that? Creativity is defined as “…thinking items together, that haven’t been thought together before and getting a value out of it…”. I would say that matches the need of connecting externally imposed demands of learning content and personal interests pretty much.

This again would emphasise a certain view on PLEs. Not only would they document ones successful learning history in an e-Portfolio and an overview on current learning activities but they could be used as a support for trying to find a relation between given learning content or topics and current personal situations. Situations of any professional or private nature. The closer to ones interest the better.
I guess with the help of some semantics in the future it will get easier for a PLE to find connections that not even me was thinking of.

My guess is, the more clear I can see what’s in it for me, the more important “it” is for me, the more motivated I am.

What’s your opinion? Any experiences with that? WVDA67ET62Q2

Posted in PLEs, eLearning, psychological | 4 Comments »

This time it’s personal

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

merged world eye stampedThinking of social e-learning instantly brings a community and interaction to mind. But … learning always starts at a personal level. And how exactly does my personal learning look like?

How is it that I’m not motivated at all to learn some cheap formulas for a cryptography exam but I’m highly motivated to learn a foreign language like Chinese, which by the way is slightly harder. My english professor always said: “The fastest way to learn a language is to have a girlfriend who just speaks this language.” I think in this case the motivation is kind of raised.
Why do we have different motivations for different things? How is it that my motivation is higher if I learn self-initiated and when I am passionate about the outcome as it is when somebody tells me to learn?

A personal learning includes intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and it includes formal and informal learning. Mostly it starts with informal learning during the days you try to stand up and walk, then it is more formal learning going through school, college or university and after that it becomes informal again. For instance if you learn a foreign language just for the fun of it or to stay active or if you discover a new sport or game.

The reason for the differentiation of informal and formal learning could be the same as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, at least in most cases. So it would be fantastic to be able to transfer formal to informal learning or sometimes vice versa. Is there a chance to convert from one into the other? How could students be engaged to disregard the boundaries of formal learning and go beyond these boundaries? Could social learning be an approach to facilitate learners to simply forget about the boundaries of formal learning and just learn as it would be informal?

picture source: http://mrg.bz/s4aN2K

Posted in eLearning, psychological | 1 Comment »

Plymouth E-Learning Conference

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

conferenceAs I mentioned a long time ago, the Plymouth E-Learning Conference has succsessfully started today. After an enlightning key note from Mike Balmires, our Atlantis Project will have its own track. The track will contain 14 presentations during thursday and friday. If you are around stop by at one of our presentation to get an impression of our project. The first presentation is already running in Room 11.

Posted in Atlantis, Events, eLearning, social networks | No Comments »

Social networks @ CeBIT

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

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After a walk through several halls, I spotted some more interessting stands offering quite innovative services in the field of social networking and eLearning.

Blogtronix
Social online networks are not just a personal fun pages any more but very interesting for enterprises to use internally to improve collaboration within the enterprise or externally to cooperate with customers and suppliers. Blogtronix, a company located in Bulgaria, Canada and USA, offers social online networks especially tailored to enterprise needs.

Kontextwork
André Ulrich and his company kontextwork offers Wikis, adapted to special needs of enterprises. Needs like online social networks, knowledge management, news, blogging and project-based collaboration can be served with wikis. Applicated Wikis are based on OpenSource projects and can be developed further to any kind of

Commetrix
Commetrix is a project of the Technical University of Berlin. It provides various ways to visualize social networks with a lot of input. Email traffic or online social networks can be analyzed and displayed. The results of the analysis can be tweaked and shaped in different ways like narrow it down by keyword. Taken its almost real-time character it is really useful for monitoring or getting snapshots of any kind of network.

VennMaker
A different approach of capture information about social networks is VennMaker. It doesn’t automatically import data from networks but offers the possibility of enter information manually as you talk to an individual. It focuses the subjective character of information provided by persons. Social networks can be drawn and exported in an easy way.

social virtPresenter
social virtPresenter developed by the University of Osnabrueck is an Facebook application that offers a lot of funktions for eLearning for the existing online social network. Videos of lectures can be watched online together with friends. Questions can be asked, according to specific points in the video. The watch behaviour is recorded and is visualized in the form of how often was a particular point watched.

Posted in Events, eLearning, social networks | No Comments »

eLearning @ CeBIT

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

After a good start, featuring a presentation of Prof. Dr. Udo Bleimann live on stage, talking about the Atlantis University Project, I took a brief look across projects about eLearning.

Komuniki
I had a very nice chat with a feller from Komuniki at our Stand. Komuniki is a young vibrant company based in Cyprus and Germany. They created a eLearning comunity featuring intercultural communication and collaboration. Attend an online class learning also about your virtual neighbor from India, China or wherever in the world.

CampusContent
Prof. Dr.-ing Krämer from Fern-Universität Hagen is creating a repository for eLearning media content called CampusContent. Why produce every little bit of media content yourself when there is already a bunch of content available. The repository will feature crontribution of new content and copy or reference things. It will also feature a licencing model in order to protect content from ilegal copying.

LiveSocial
Kalmann Graffi a PhD candidate from TU Darmstadt is currently developing LiveSocial, a social network offering features similar to StudiVZ but with a peer-to-peer network model.

Liquiverse
A company not directly involved in eLearning but still worth mentioning is an Liquiverse, founded by of a very innovative friend of mine. With Liquifile and Liquibase, Carsten Waldeck, is storming the field of browsing in a innovative manor. Even the official CeBIT website is featuring his liquid browsing to find exhibitors.

Posted in Events, eLearning | No Comments »

Atlantis @ CeBIT

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Schwarzenegger and MerkelOn March 2nd, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Angela Merkel will open the CeBIT fair in Hannover Germany and our eLearning project “Atlantis University Portal” will be present. Together with the Technical Transfer Network of the State Hessen, we will present our eLearning project. We will be located in the Hall 9 where eGovernment will be the main topic. Come and visit us at Hall 9 Stand C22.

Posted in Atlantis, Events, eLearning | No Comments »

Plymouth e-Learning Conference

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

conferenceI would like to advise you of the Plymouth e-Learning Conference on April 23rd – 24th. Go on their website and see for yourself what amazing program Steve and Mark have assembled. Hope to see you in Plymouth in April.

Posted in eLearning | No Comments »