Five free places to learn how to touch type online August 14, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentSites suggested by Jane Hart. For links, click through to her post (at end, below):
1. Goodtyping.com – Online typing course
2. Peter’s Online Typing Course – A set of free online typing lessons and typing exercises for beginning typists
3. Power Typing -this online free typing tutor is an educational web site for kids, students and adults alike!
4. typeonline.co.uk – structured touch typing course for motivated individuals looking to develop their keyboard skills
5. Typing Web – free online typing tutor & keyboarding tutorial for typists of all ages. All skill levels will benefit from TypingWeb’s free keyboarding lessons.
UPDATE: I’ve just found another one on my list!
6. Keybr – Online keyboarding lesson
You can't do that in a classroom! July 2, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentWhat traditional teaching env. canNOT do (Cath Ellis — great post): "I think it’s time we shifted our thinking away from what eLearning can do to what traditional teaching environments can’t do. The simple fact is, however, that such thinking is deeply iconoclastic. The simple suggestion that traditional, face-to-face learning environments have limitations and *gasp* may even be found wanting is unthinkable to many teachers and learners who have never experienced anything else. But that’s precisely the point. It’s vital that we be able to evaluate different teaching and learning environments on their objective relative merits in order to best harness their distinct potentials. As such, it’s vital that we move away from old-fashioned hierarchical thinking that positions face-to-face learning environments at the top of the heap.
To that end, here is a list of 5 things that can’t be (easily) done in a rigidly synchronous learning space (a time-limited physical face-to-face classroom) "
Can a computer lecture better than a human? October 24, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentScott McLeod makes the case for covering the basics online. His example is a school assignment but his point has wider application:
"Don’t get me wrong. There’s still a lot of value in human teachers when it comes to explaining difficult concepts, working through students’ misconceptions, inspiring students to want to explore deeper, and so on. We’re not replaceable by robots and software just yet. But […]
There is a wealth of research showing that around 80 to 85 percent of classroom work is low-level factual and procedural work, exactly the kind of work that can easily be facilitated by the kinds of technology-mediated learning activities that I’ve alluded to this post. So why waste an expensive human on those things?"
£5.7m to develop Open Education pilot projects in UK October 15, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Education, HEA, Teaching resources, learning , add a commentFrom the HEFCE press release today:
HEFCE has announced an initial £5.7 million of funding for pilot projects that will open up existing high-quality education resources from higher education institutions to the world.
In plain English, this means making available teaching and related material in digital form — for others in HE (and elsewhere) to reuse and adapt for teaching and learning.
The press notice explains that:
Open educational resources could include full courses, course materials, complete modules, notes, videos, assessments, tests, simulations, worked examples, software, and any other tools or materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
Also spotted today: Martin Weller of the Open University writes about SocialLearn, the OU’s project to develop a social network for learning — a few steps on from its Open Education initiative, OpenLearn.
Anyone wanting to keep track of developments in Open Education would do well to check Stephen Downes’ invaluable blog, where it features frequently, eg covering recent publications and events.
Virtual Learning: Reinventing the wheel? October 9, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentThe Open University’s head of learning innovation responded to a question I keep encountering. In his answers, institutional (corporate) priorities loom large, of course — but integration and one-step authentication are also about making it work well for student and staff users.
One of the questions which crops up regularly at the OU is why we’re enhancing tools such as blogs and wikis within Moodle when there are better ones out there on the Internet which we could give access to instead. Why don’t we just provide WordPress and MediaWiki which have a lot more features than their Moodle equivalents?