Am I a praise junkie?

I came across this article about praising children via the e-learningpost. I’m glad I took the time to read it as not only did it present studies with young children and their approach to learning depending on the type of praise they received but there were also some studies conducted with students at college and high school.

On a personal level it’s given me some food for thought about how I parise my own child (though at only 19 months I think I have some time to adapt my approach to praise before I/they too become a praise junkie) but the studies certainly give me some food for thought about how to approach feedback to students. 

Learning technology support through the ages

For those days when it seems nobody understands you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6j8XPFOPy4

Does this sum Web 2.0 up?

I saw a couple of posts about this YouTube video which meant that I had to go and have a peek.

You’ll need to pay attention but I think it encapsulates the development of the web up to web2.0 very succinctly.

Thanks to the e-learning post and Joho the blog for pointing it out.

Why benchmark e-learning?

An article by Michael Fieldstein  on benchmarking e-learning caught my eye for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, my boss, Derek Morrison is currently seconded to the He Academy to work on the HEA’s benchmarking exercise. So I was interested Michael’s perspective on the matter. 

Secondly, the mention of the UKeU in the first paragraph caught my attention to see if Michael had any insights from across the pond on that particular episode in the UK’s e-learning history. (Coincidently (?) Derek was also seconded to work at the UKeU. You can find some of his postings on the matter at the University of Bath’s Auricle Blog).

And finally, as I read through the article his thoughts on metrics in organisations struck a chord with me as recently we’ve been asked to provide some quite, detailed, statistics for a survey (external not internal). In trying to answer the survey’s questions we have found ourselves wanting to put a lot of caveats around our answers but alas there’s very little option for doing that and hence one wonders what meaningful conclusions could be drawn from the survey… I’d be interested to find out.

Bodington Next Gen

Sometimes, I wonder at coincidence…

I was just about to post about an email that was sent to several JISCmail lists about an announcement from several major UK universities join up to form the Tetra collaboration (see the announcement here) and the work that their going to do in consortium with Sakai when, via Stephen Downes, I came across this interesting post from Alfred Elssa regarding where Sakai sits in relation to the broader e-learning community and the Blackboard patents.

Presumably, in light of the FUD surrounding the BB patents, both Sakai and Bodington are quite happy that their collaboration will not be perceived as a threat to BB. Or that they in anyway impinge on those patents (regardless of whether Desire2Learn can show that patents are groundless)…

Cool snap functionality

Here’s the BBC

here’s a test post with docs

NettiquettePaulwould like to attach a doc

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