I like the "rip-mix-burn" Teacher as a DJ metaphor proposed by "Iterating Towards Openness". I promise to refrain from changing the lyrics of Just Dance to match this concept, but I will tell you that, "I’ve had a little bit too much…", is actually "… a little bit too much of boring lectures". So remember to Strike A Pose!

Need a YouTube clone, installed and only accessible within your own organization/educational institution or you may just be after creating your own genre specific social media site on the internet???? Look no further than PHPmotion. Story Circles from the Center of Digital Story Telling uses PHPmotion. The content on Story Circles is quite interesting too.

Quite a few interesting papers from the MUPPLE08 conf. Particularly liked the “Adding mash-up based tailorability to VLEs for scripted Collaborative Learning” paper which has an example of using MediaWiki to render the mashups (made with a tool called Collage).

Smashing Magazine is renowned for their ‘the best of’ articles eg CSS, JQuery, etc…. I’ve stumbled on the equivalent in education terms: ZaidLearn. ZaidLearn has:

• 101 Free Learning Tools
• 101 Open Educational Resources
• 101 Free Edu Games
• Amazing Free elearning eBook Collection

I am just not sure if slideshare is the best way to present the material??????

JavaBat, provides a unique way to learn Java in an online enviroment ie no SDK or IDE to install - just a way to concentrate on the syntax and get immediate feedback. I’d clasify JavaBat as a programming online tutor, intelligence still to be determined.

"Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments", is the best paper I have read on Learning Design by far!

Essentially, Learning Environment Design is the missing link. I agree. Tools within the LMS are rudimentary and not generally exposed to Students as creators. The paper introduces the Mash-UP Personal Learning Environment (MUPPLE) system and a Learner Interaction Scripting Language (LISL) which works as a Domain Specific Language (DSL) behind the scenes. LISL is powerful, making it easy to combine content and activities which can then be deployed, shared and adapted (evolved). LISL just needs a GUI addon to be super intuitive and adaptable.

OK so now I think I have worked on something similar. A tool called Interactive Media Enhanced Teaching (IMET) that was available in QUT’s inhouse built OLT system. The M in IMET had a different meaning depending on who you spoke to - M for Media or Multimedia and now I’m thinking M could actually have stood for Mashup. A paper entitled “Putting the ‘me’ into media: Exploring different strategies to embed the integration of streaming media with cognitive tools, into learning activities” was presented at the OLT 2003 conference. I’m not an author of the paper, but I was the developer of IMET. I did present a Flex powered version at Ausweb 06.

"Empowering Online Learning - 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying and Doing" is set to be an amazing resource for Academics, Tutors, Teachers, Students and Learning Designers. I have not read this book yet, but really like the approach taken. The learning design model (reading, reflecting, displaying and doing) just makes sense at a very practical level and rather than just remaining theoretical sample activities are listed (100+ to be exact). The activities seem like ideas to me, ideas that could inspire….

…Now would it not be great if the LD model (reading, reflecting, displaying and doing) was available as an idea explorer within an LMS or something more social like Facebook, where activities could be selected, customized and then deployed.

May the force be with those who use it

Calling all Learning Designers, Educational Designers, Instructional Designers, Educational Software Developers and Academics…

Take the Connected Academic Quiz?

My results:

Grainne Conole of e4inovation.com is the co-author of a must read paper entitled "Using learning design as a framework for supporting the design and reuse of Open Educational Resources". I think the use of Compendium, a mind mapping tool, as a remix tool may just work…

It must be a good day - I have after all encountered two EDU 2.0 apps. Cohere, from Open Uni UK, takes concept/idea mapping to a new collaborative level. Add ideas, make connections and then discover related ideas and people.

Research paper on Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation.