About Me

Education, the knowledge society, the global market all connected through technology and cross-cultural communication skills are I am all about. I hope through this blog to both guide others and travel myself across disciplines, borders, theories, languages, and cultures in order to create connections to knowledge around the world. I teach at the University level in the areas of Business, Language, Communication, and Technology.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Integrating elearning into the classroom

This post is in part due to poor reading skills on my part. Ken Allen wrote a post "the loneliness of the elearner," which I read as, "the loneliness of the elevator." This got me to thinking about the metaphor of the elevator in elearning:

Interestingly enough, I thought your title read, "the loneliness of the ELEVATOR" (I guess I should get my glasses fixed). Ironically, being alone in a space like second life is probably by being alone in an elevator. Where do you look? Is someone watching you that you can't see? What if you get stuck? You only have the disembodied voice to tell you, "Help is on the way." And if you are on the elevator with someone, you feel too awkward to speak to them unless something goes wrong. What are the unspoken rules of engagement on an elevator?


At the same time, my daughter's school has decided to integrate some days of online learning into the curriculum, partly to give teachers the opportunity to meet without students for professional development, and partly to prepare students for online learning in college. I was asked to lend my experience in developing these online activities. With that in mind, I have been thinking of the components that needs to go into the design of these activities.

In my introduction to distance learning course, I break the course up into 4 components: technology, instructional design, social presence, and assessment. Over the next few posts I will look at each of these components and what I feel needs to be considered for an online activity as part of a face to face course.

2 comments:

Blogger In Middle-earth said...

Kia ora Virginia!

Good that you got something out of my post :) even if it was on misinterpretation, ha ha ha! Maybe I should choose a different font for my posts.

I'm enjoying reading your resultant study.

Catchya later

V Yonkers said...

Or maybe I should get my glasses adjusted!