12 eLearning Predictions for 2009 : eLearning Technology

Tony Karrer has listed on his blog, what he calls his 12 eLearning Predictions for 2009... I think establishing such a list is truly a heroic act in itself, because even if you get one prediction wrong, people will point it out to you... :-) and omit to give you credit for your wisdom to correctly predict many other trends...

I also think that it would be interesting to compare and integrate his list with a section in Roblyer and Doering's (2009) textbook on "Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching" called "Looking Ahead: What Developments in Technology Integration Are Emerging?". Fundamentally an online list like Karrer's, especially when you come back to it at the end of the year and evaluate it, is more valuable and up-to-date than any list printed in a paper-based textbook... for reason I think are obvious... :-)

I highly recommend that those interested in the Integration of Technology into Teaching & Learning have a look at this slideshow by Sacha Chua... It's not only very nicely made, the content is highly interesting too...

I'm waiting for your comments, questions and reactions...

Social networking sites: why no abuse report button?

Nic Fleming, contributor

Facebook and MySpace are failing to protect children from paedophiles and bullies, a former senior police officer says.

The social networking sites have refused to embed a "report button" that would allow users to report abuse. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has devised the free "abuse button" that would link children and teenagers to advice and put them in contact with counsellors and law enforcement officers.

Jim Gamble, head of the CEOP, said his team has long tried to persuade popular sites to adopt the tool. He dismissed the technical difficulties raised by some sites including Facebook and MySpace as "red herrings".

Bebo announced yesterday that it would be using the button.

According to the CEOP, 5000 investigations have been initiated because of information received from those using the button, leading to 800 arrests in the past three years.

Facebook hit back at the criticism, telling the BBC that it had previously tested similar systems. It said that such systems had been shown to be ineffective and actually reduced the reporting of abuse, and that as an international site it preferred to have its own global system.

Facebook attracted widespread criticism and was forced into a U-turn earlier this year when it quietly changed its terms and conditions to allow it sell or share users' data once they had closed their accounts.

Categories: Science In Society | Technology

• Posted on November 18, 2009 1:43 PM
Posted by Julian Richards at November 18, 2009 1:43 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (3)

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I really do think that such largely used social web websites should embed protection tools! However, I do also think that we need to educate kids to use such "abuse report buttons", in a reasonable and decent way, otherwise they will not be able to protect themselves and might even misuse them to bully other kids/adults.

Tools are tools and can always be used in favour or in disfavour of people! So we will always need education to learn to use them wisely...

Crowdsourcing

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Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design^[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

I've just come across this term... I knew about the process... but had no word for it... happily now I have one.

I think Crowdsourcing (CS) is related to the concept of SOCIAL PROSTHETICS (SP), or rather SP can be thought of as a small version of CS... Because the SP process can involve only one or two people, while CS is, by definition, implying a large group of people... but both concepts describe processes where a task is performed in a distributed way.

Cloudworks is a social networking site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas and designs.

I will use this website more and more to get ideas about teaching and learning and as a resource for my initial teacher training students...

I think that this teacher's PERFORMANCE was great! And many of you may think that this was a great lesson... It was funny, well orchestrated, etc.

However, I do think that it's ultimately also an example of "bad teaching"... because it's ENTERTAINMENT instead of LEARNING. Students will remember this "lesson", but they will certainly not remember anything of the math content "explained"... math, here, is not essential, it's the background of the "theater play". Moreover only the teacher was active here... and wow, what a well prepared "lesson"... students were merely laughing and being entertained... students were passive... the teacher probably learned a lot about video-projections and the like while he was preparing this SHOW... but all that students probably learned was that they have a cool teacher, who thinks that they deserve such a nicely prepared show for Halloween... Students certainly deserve teachers who like to work, but, hey, they certainly deserve teachers who make them learn themselves, who encourage them to be creaCtive producers instead of passive consumers...

Thanks to Kristina Höppner for pointing out this video to me.

The "LSF Lexique" is an online video database with signs for specialty concepts (for instance terms in medical sciences) in the French Signs Language.

The idea is to build up (and make available) a reference database for FSL signs to represent concepts for which there are no "official" signs, because these concepts come from a very narrowly-defined domain and are thus not part of the "normal", every-day FSL vocabulary.

This is an interesting example of how ICT tools can be used to foster learning in people with special needs.