social-learning – EdtechPost

http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no2/abstracts.htm

Maybe I follow the wrong crowd, or maybe it’s just a case of journals becoming increasingly marginal as a way to disseminate work, but I’m surprised, especially given the crowd I do follow, that I hadn’t heard a peep about the latest issue of JOLT dedicated to “Next Generation Learning/Course Management Systems.”

While I found the opening piece quite painful (and a pretty surprising way to lead off an issue on ‘next generation’ systems, if you ask me), if you dig in there is much goodness here. Patricia McGee and Marybeth Green’s piece on “Lifelong Learning and Systems: A Post-Fordist Analysis” is very good, and Gary Brown and Nils Peterson’s article on “The LMS Mirror” is well worth the read, if only for the anecdote of the custodian, something that deserves to be enshrined in ed tech folklore like the story of the perennially shortened roast. And there’s more. Do yourself a favour, have a look, I promise there’s at least one article there you’ll cite in the next year. – SWL

As part of my new ongoing efforts to collect and re-present ‘Best Practice’ examples of what I’ll call “loosely coupled teaching” I am really interested to hear from readers their single best example of a course (ideally one reachable on the public internet) taught using contemporary social software/web 2.0 tools outside a course management system. What have you seen that really made you sit up and say ‘Wow! it works!’ (And before anyone starts, I am asking for ‘course‘ examples in the context of formal higher education…I know, I know, but that is the audience and context I’m working in right now.) If you had one chance, less than 5 minutes, to convince a colleague to give up their CMS addiction and teach out in the open using general web tools, what is the best example you can point them at to convince them? – SWL