Last Week

For the last week of school we have been finishing up on the training activities for Monday and Tuesday in which the trainees will be learning a lot about Web 2.0 applications and open source software. I know with our group everything seems to be coming along quite smoothly in which most of our videos that we made in Camstudio will be very useful. I made a video in which it entails me showing how to setup the iGoogle homepage for the first time. I think it will be a useful tool to look back on, and I think that it was a great idea to make these, because I know for me at least having videos like this helps make the lesson easier to understand. I look forward to this last week of class and the training sessions that we will have for these clients.

Camstudio Thoughts

This semester was the first semester I have used Camstudio hands on and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy it. I have a friend of mine from MIT who runs a very good website about different topics around the Internet in which he helps ordinary people understand how to do certain things around a computer. He used Camstudio for every instructional video that he could come up with and I never really paid attention to it until now, but this program is great! Now I can make some more videos for things such as Youtube in which I can introduce topics to people and help them understand things like my friend from MIT did. I forsee this tool to be an excellent asset to my everyday use of the Internet in general.

Class this week

During class this week we have been working alot on different aspects of one project in which we were assigned groups to different parts of the project. So far everything seems to be coming along smoothly in which we have Google applications so it is interesting in itself to see how far along Google has come in their applications available. I remember when they first introduced it and I remember trying to get familiar with it and realizing that it just wasn't working that well for Google and they needed alot of work. Now that we had another chance to learn more about it, it is quite an accomplishment to see how far they have come. I find it a privledge that we get to do an assignment on Google apps because I feel like it will become a valuable tool in itself to understand their software better.

RSS Feeds

One of my assignments in the classroom is to pick a few articles and summarize them in order to create a sort of project if you will out of it. I chose RSS feeds for e-learning instruction. To be honest I am having a more difficult time with this one than I thought. The only real article that I can find to help me out here is to be able to use them in such a case in which instructors could use RSS as a way of sending announcements to their students. So instead of sending an e-mail in which in some cases could be blocked by junk mail filters, non-delieverable due to bad addresses, etc. You could use RSS as an subscribe feature to where your students will get instant updates and news. I find this pretty cool, the only problem is that this might take a while to develop to where it is used all the time since e-mailing the class is pretty much standard if something important shows up.

Although I have found some personal uses for RSS in which you could have something be delivered to you daily as mentioned above a subscribe feature perhaps. I think e-learning could use something like this because if someone is taking a distance education course or Internet course, they could have their assignments and readings sent to them everyday without having to do anything. I will look more into this idea and possibly expand on it.

Today we talked about the different programs that we are going to be using for our Virtual PCs in the classroom. I really do not understand the complication with this issue for some of the students in the class. I feel like there are alot of programs on that list that do not need to be on there, nor do they need to have as high of a score as it proclaims.
All we need is a handful of programs that do different things but at the same time might actually let us learn something. I understand that is the concept of what we are trying to do here with the spreadsheet, but it is a little overdone. For an instance we don't need 5 programs that do almost the exact same thing nor do we need 5 web 2.0 applications that are similar. Hopefully this issue will be at a resolve after this week.

Telelearning from 94

We got passed around today an interesting document containing future ideals about what should take place around our time now and in which was called The Futurist. I found this interesting because alot of the ideals such as televised lectures and electronic lectures do take place now and in which some colleges actually only exist thanks to these types of technologies because most or all the classes are online or through distance education. Others such as Local Area Networks are becoming alot more widely used in the Wide Area Network categories and are not as focused upon as was predicted. There is also a note about how the teacher's role will shift from lecturing to advising or coaching students on career paths and such. I feel like this role has always been here and teachers actually do more than just advise or coach, they are required to multitask in which they teach classes, advise and take care of distance education or internet courses.

Another aspect is the focus on distance education. I still feel as if this idea needs to be evolved more, because alot of the colleges that are online only or require alot of distance education are not as respected in the work world as a local good standing accredited college. I think that this is because the people that are hiring the new graduates are used to a standard classroom experience in which there are lectures and maybe some hands on training. That is why I feel that this ideal needs more time to evolve and quite possibly in the future from now these types of learning experiences will be more well respected than they are now.

I found this document to be very interesting, it almost wants me to write down a few ideals as to what I believe the future will be once I have put on a few years and see if I am right or wrong as well.