I am giving a presentation tomorrow entitled eLearning Processes Using Small Technologies Loosely Joined at the LORNET research symposium as part of eLearn 101 at the University of Saskatchewan. My basic idea is inspired by Brian Lamb, Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined wiki-blog-presentation-jam-session that they put together and presented from NMC 2004. There are a lot of robust and fully featured eLearning systems from a variety of vendors or other sources, but all the components of these eLearning systems are readily and often freely available (as in beer and speech). I gloss over a couple of examples using blogs and wikis that I have been involved with as a teacher.
I’m throwing the presentation online early just to see if anyone wants to comment on it. I’m due to give the presentation just before lunch tomorrow; if you leave any comments before then, I’ll try to work them into the presentation. Or if you are going to be at the presentation, you can judge for yourself if its worth staying, or taking off early for lunch (and if you do, save me a spot) ;^D
I’m also excited because of the tools used to prepare the presentation. I figure if I’m going to be evangelizing open source, I had better walk the walk as well as talk the talk. I used Dave Winer’s recently released (under GPL) OPML Editor to prepare the content as an outline. Luca Mearelli released a brilliant hack that allows the OPML file to be exported as XOXO outline format which, with a little XSL magic, can be used by Eric Meyer’s ubercool s5 presentation system for web browsers (think powerpoint but it runs natively in any modern browser). All these tools are free which means that my PowerPoint dependency is nearly gone!
If you have been grievously stunned by the overuse of geekronyms in the previous paragraph, I do apologize. If not, go get these tools now and start outlining and presenting. And don’t forget to check out my presentation on DIY eLearning systems.
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August 18th, 2005 at 22:30
DIY eLearning — nice hook, and I love the line “The components of the DIY eLearning System are the Learning Objects…”
I am duly awed by your production method — thanks for sharing the technique.
I’d wish you luck, but you won’t need it.
August 18th, 2005 at 22:39
Thanks for your comments, Brian, and for the groovy goodness that is Small Pieces Loosely Joined. You guys sure started a powerful meme for talking about educational technology.
August 19th, 2005 at 04:33
Good job Rob. I’ve delicious tagged it with Alan Levine’s edpdonline tag by the way. DArcy’s gnomz comic and many more appear on the blendedlearning wiki if you wanted to draw in a few graphics that articulate similar ideas….
August 19th, 2005 at 09:18
Thanks for the suggestion, Leigh. I’ve got about an hour before I go up to present so I might be able to work a comic into the presentation by then.
August 19th, 2005 at 15:52
Hi Rob,
Thanks for presenting your workshop outline before your presentation tomorrow. I have a workshop next week and I am putting together a basic intro to blogging and ICT for teachers interested in including global education issues in their courses. Your production has plenty of features that I will study more closely and use, if not for my upcoming workshop, for ongoing presentations. I’m a newbie to blogging and ICT so I do appreciate your sharing and putting this material “out there” for others to see.
Brent MacKinnon
August 19th, 2005 at 18:53
Nice job Rob, I thought you’d be using DArcy’s strip. Tell us how it went then? Where to from here?
The times I have given presentations like these, most people in the audience are blown away by how easy and cheap network learning can be, but in the end they always return back to a very centralised way of doing things. Lately, I’ve been challenged by the LMS services also offering RSS, Blogs, Wikis etc. Managers miss the point of the distributed learning model and think the centralisation of these ‘trendy’ services is great. (privacy, security, control, IP… good grief!)
August 19th, 2005 at 22:26
Nicely done Rob– I’m honored that our shindig in Vancouver inpsired your carrying on the small pieces approach. And I like what you’ve done with S5, gotta try that outline editor approach.
BTW, I am trying to do a del.icio.us collection of S5 presentations (there are someintermingled with other stuff tagged as “S5″) by tagging a few as “S5present”:
http://del.icio.us/tag/s5present
Good luck with the presentation, or if it already happened, hoist a cold one.
August 19th, 2005 at 23:43
Great presentation, Rob! I’ll definitely be borrowing your OPML –> S5 workflow, too! That’s the slickest presentation authoring/publishing workflow I’ve seen. Well, maybe on par with Brian’s “I’m just going to start with a wiki page and see what happens” style
August 20th, 2005 at 00:59
I’m late on this Rob … been gone. But hey, fantastic stuff. I’m with D’Arcy when he says he’ll be borrowing the workflow … I’m really looking forward to trying this out. Thanks for sharing this great stuff!
August 20th, 2005 at 23:46
Thanks, everyone, for the kind words. Brian, D’Arcy and Alan - I’m doing my best to spread the meme; thanks for starting it. As for what’s next, Leigh, I’m going to put together a few notes on the workflow that I used, since I think it is a good example of the small tools approach that I was talking about. I’m also going to post some notes about how the presentation went - the short version is that it seemed to generate some positive buzz by many participants at the symposium. And of course, I’m going to keep the meme of small tools loosely joined spreading, especially in the high school where I teach and will be acting as the technology support teacher starting next week.
Thanks again for your interest, and watch this space for further interations of the theme.
September 6th, 2005 at 00:54
[…] ost-mortem to DIY eLearning systems