Technology rocks! (when it works)

Hello
Feeling a lot like Friday on a Monday.....!
We had 3 courses in today and the laptops weren't playing at all!! If anythign could send me screeching faster toward e-learning it would be a day like today: when you spend more time trying to get a presentation/network connection for your resources going than actually getting participants to engage with the material....

Anyway, technology rocks in major way when it works....one of the things I have been exploring is itunes. I read in one of the (on-line) American nursing journals about some of the sites that have some real 'value addedness' from the perspective that there were eminent professors podcasting their lectures...... And here i was thinking itunes was about building your music collection! Well, I am a fan: I did indeed find some very suitable material for my teaching practise and whatsmore, found a whole bunch of stuff related to e-learning. I have listened to 4 podcasts so far. One of them was from Dr Michael Allen and was in parts offering a critique about ADDIE (which I will post on the group website after the introductions week). The other 3 were from the UK about the big poject in central south NHS and national e-learning initiatives. I got a a great deal out of these........why?

Well interestingly they are much farther on in terms of their e-learning development for nursing and health. They are going to have a national library of knowledge objects (as opposed to a LOR). This will give users the opportunity to harvest a range of products related to their search topic which will include e-learning and learning objects as well as articles, URLs etc.... Sounds great! The other thing I got from the lectures was very reassuring. Their experience with consumers of elearning is that in nursing and some allied healthcare professional groups at least, they know that in a continuing professional development (CPD) sense learners prefer blended approaches. This fits nicely with my earlier concern that I need to be able to evaluate behavioural change as a result of the e-learning course/resource. I am taking behaviour here to mean a psychomotor, observable skill. One of the talkers made a great point of reminding me that we are not filling empty vessels at the level of CPD. What these learners value of themselves is their wealth of knowledge and experience. Our role as e-teachers then, is to offer material that adds on to this. Subsequently, they are interested to demonstrate in practice what they have learned. They also discussed the nature of quality monitoring in e-learning. It seems that evaluation is an international hot topic!!

The other thing I think I need to do on reflection, is learn how to reference a podcast....and remember who I am listening to!! MMMMMMMMMM
sam