December 2008

  • Potential of Online Education in Developing Countries
    by Mike Madin | Wed, 12/03/2008 - 00:02

    While traveling through rural Mexico recently I couldn't help but wonder why the potential for online education, both academic and vocational training, is not being realized in developing countries. Browsing the Mexico Channel under Education their page of Online Courses contains no listings. While the use of technology is high among the youth with cell phones and text messaging popular in urban areas the digital revolution is still slow to make much progress in rural Mexico.

  • Recommended reading: The World is Flat
    by Karyn Romeis | Mon, 12/01/2008 - 05:11

    I confess that I have major issue with the premise of this book, hailing as I do from a third world country where the average small business enjoys less bandwidth than the average American teenager, where a large percentage of the population does not have access to the internet at all (in fact a large percentage of the population has neither electricity nor indoor plumbing), and of those th

  • Recommended reading: Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning
    by Karyn Romeis | Mon, 12/08/2008 - 04:31

    A bit of a mouthful of a title, I know, but you'll be pleased to discover - after the relatively expensive books I have reviewed lately - that this one is free. Strictly speaking, it's a research paper, not a book.

    Let me start by making a few disclosures:

  • Will education demand decrease?
    by Harold Jarche | Tue, 12/23/2008 - 08:03

    It seems that finding buyers of student loans that have been in default is getting more difficult, according to Inside HigherEd:

  • Recommended reading: Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development
    by Karyn Romeis | Mon, 12/22/2008 - 05:58

    The strapline for this book is "A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle 1.9"
    I would prefer to see it referred to as a guide to teaching using Moodle 1.9, because the book is decidedly aimed at teachers.

    It is a very accessible book. Logically laid out, with lots of screen dumps, and chunks of reusable code.

    From the outset, Rice touches on valid point, when he says that Moodle's help files, while explaining 'how', do not explain "when and why to use each feature". He sets out to address that and, on the whole, my view is that he succeeds.

    Tags: CMS, LMS, Moodle, VLE

  • Recommended reading: a few blogs
    by Karyn Romeis | Mon, 12/29/2008 - 05:58

    It occurs to me that my growing list of book reviews don't give a true reflection of my own reading. In fact, I catch up with several blogs every day as a matter of course, engaging in the conversation by offering comments and responding to the comments of others. So, over the next while, I will provide pointers to some of the learning-related blogs that I read on a regular basis.

  • Out of Control
    by Harold Jarche | Sun, 12/14/2008 - 06:57

    The institution is losing control. First educational content, in the form of lectures, notes and slides, became available for free on the Internet and from some of the best universities in the world. Then we found ways to rate faculty without consulting the university. The content is now being aggregated as witnessed in iTunes University. We don't have a way to crowd source the lecture rating but Mark Pesce thinks that's coming soon, as he's written in Inflection Points:

    Tags: higher_education, internet, university

  • Check the zeitgeist with hashtags
    by Harold Jarche | Thu, 12/18/2008 - 21:16

    Twitter is a microblogging platform that has really caught fire this year. It lets you send out a stream of short bursts like quick links to topics of interest only to people who have chosen to follow you. By adding the pound sign (#) to a word you can can create hashtags. Examples of hashtags of interest to readers here might be:

    university

    edubooks