I have never done something like this before. It has been interesting to learn how to setup a blog, and how to use it in a educational environment. I hope to implement what I have learned into the subjects that I teach. I will need to use blogs a bit more before I will know how exactly to use blogs in my courses.
I can say that the experience was well worth my while and that it has shown me another web 2.0 technology that I can use in educating students in DE. Blogs will be one of the major components that I look at when I next redesign the courses that I teach. While reading my favorite magazine (South African Popular Mechanics), I came across an article in which they discuss Facebook's acquisition of Palmer Luckey's Oculus VR company. This lead me to think of the application that VR will have in engineering education in the future.
Teaching engineering in a DE environment is full of problems, of which the main one is that students need to do experiments and practicals to qualify for their qualifications. Up to now this has been accommodated by requiring students to attend laboratories across the country. With the advent of the new type of VR, it will be much easier to do and manage these practicals. Students will be able to do their practicals from a computer over the internet at any time that suits them. The main problem as I see it will be the outlay cost of designing the VR environments and buying the VR equipment. I am looking forward to working in this new environment in the future. http://www.popularmechanics.co.za/ While DE is not a new form of education, it does take some getting used to lecturing in this format. One of the most obvious problems that teachers encounter is that there is no immediate interaction and feedback from the students. The responsibilities of the teacher also differs in that the teacher in more involved in the administration tasks required and the way in which students view their own experience with the education method.
The role of the teacher is more that of a guide through the work than it is in face to face education. Because of the constraints that are inherent to DE the student must be able to do most of the work prescribed on his own and the lecturer acts as a guide through the work. From the readings that we had in module 3, I found that I knew all of the technologies that were mentioned throughout. I am most familiar with digital books, and least with blogs. This makes this exercise of writing and maintaining a blog an interesting one. The only web 2.0 technology that I currently use in teaching my courses is digital books. It was very interesting to read of ways in which some of the other web 2.0 tools can be used in education.
In the courses that I teach, I can see myself making use of some of these tools. Though I will still have to do my due diligence, I think that I can definitely make use of wikis and blogs when I redesign the courses. Another tool that is not mentioned prominently in the readings, namely portfolios, will suite my courses. I have been investigating the use of portfolios for about 3 months and they seem to be a good fit for my courses. Choosing which web 2.0 tools should be used in a specific course is, I think, one of the most important parts of designing a course. If the right technology is chosen at this stage it makes the whole course delivery more robust. If a new web 2.0 tool is added after a course has already been developed, it could mean that the delivery of the course is not as seamless as it would have been had the web 2.0 tool been added in the design phase of the course. With the development of technology growing exponentially, I foresee a time where we as teachers will need to redesign our courses each time before they are delivered. At this time this is not possible, as (at Unisa) it takes up to 3 years to go through the process as it excites today. This is one of the areas that I am interested in, trying to reduce the time that it takes to redesign a course. During this week, one of the chapters that we had to read was Current state of Mobile Learning by John Traxler. What I found very interesting was that this chapter was published in 2009, just before the release of Apple's iPad. In the chapter Traxler states that learners will carry their phones and iPods with them, but will seldom carry a laptop or Tablet PC. Only a year later it was not uncommon to see students walking around with an iPad and today most all students have a tablet that they carry with them. The reason I point this out is that it just goes to show that, the future is very hard to predict and making absolute statements concerning the future of technology and its use can leave you feeling a bit foolish in a very short time. Technology is evolving at an exponential rate and when we discuss the future use of it, we should always consider that what is innovative and exceptional today will be eclipsed tomorrow by the next innovative and exceptional thing. I think that we as educators will always be trying to play catch-up with new and better technology.It is up to us to learn how to use these technologies in education before implementing them in courses that we teach. References Traxler, J. (2009). Current state of mobile learning. In Ally, E. (Ed.), Mobile learning: Transforming the delivery of educationand training (pp. 9-24)[Adobe Digital Editions version]. Retrieved from http:// This blog is part of my studies towards a MEd in technology and education. Here I will post reflections and thoughts about the course OMDE 603 and its required readings. This will be my first authoring of a blog and I hope that there will be no "technical" difficulties while I learn the ropes :)
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