http://bradboy.wetpaint.com/

OK. Wikis are are a very cool bit of kit. The uses for these are almost endless. On a personal note I can see this being very useful for my music career where I can promote myself with a free website.
But back to the subject at hand. How could this be used in the learning environment?
Well sites like Wet Paint would tie in well with the RSS Aggregators. Group projects could be set up on a wiki and contributed to by students and monitored by as well as added to by the teacher.
I haven't full explored the capacity of this technology but it is one that looks exciting. The wetpaint site appears orderly and easy to navigate. It actually looks like fun. Students would be contributing and benifiting from the experiances of others at the same time. Each student contibution would build on that of previous students.
More soon.

RSS Agrigators

It’s been a while but I’m working through the various technologies. This post will about the RSS Aggregator. Well it took a while but I got it sorted. I chose Google Reader because I already had a Google account. I now have accounts all over the web. It’s just a simple cut and paste of someone else’s blog or home page and your monitoring their activity. You could use this in a couple of ways with students. One way would be to set up a group project with students contributing individually to construct a communal website. As the students contributed to the site you would automatically be updated on the progress and who was contributing.
George Siemens quotes Karen Stevenson in Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age when she says ‘I store my knowledge in my friends.’ RSS Aggregators fit neatly into Connectivism Theory. Siemens asserts that, according to Connectivism, learning rests in diversity of opinions and continual learning is facilitated by nurturing and maintaining connections.

e-learing 1st Blog

It's not even start of term yet and already I feel like I'm behind. My teaching experience is limited and the first challenge I see is finding the happy medium between what are often fractious dichotomies. I believe them, in many, cases to be false dichotomies, like that between nurture/nature and that a balance must be struck nut without rigid, unchangeable parameters.My problem is that I have little experience of either the academic (theory) or the delivery (practical). This of course will come with time. I have in my limited time as an instructor with Learning Network QLD encountered the three components of Engagement Theory as describe in the article Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning, by Greg Kearsley & Ben Shneiderman, e.g. group and project based and outside or practical use, and found them to be very useful and practical.
As I progress in the subject my blogs will become more informed and, with luck and a solid work ethic, more enlightening.