Periodic Fable

Wednesday, 28 January 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS: NEW LEARNING GENERATION

eLearning Papers is looking for essays on topics related to the new learning culture and generation impelled by ICT. The papers may address themes such as new social media in learning, changing learning cultures and habits and learning through mobiles and games. Article submission deadline: 30 March 2009. More information
Labels: articles, call for papers, european_projects, journal

posted by Helen Whitehead 8:43 AM

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Saturday, 17 January 2009

Features of eportfolios

I was musing on some eportfolio features:

An eportfolio should sit between one’s personal space/personal learning space and the institutional learning space (eg VLE)

Possible uses of eportfolios
assessment
application for certification
job application
personnel record
continuing professional development
career management
Some desirable features:
A good app for creating an Action Plan and scaffolding its creation
Pulls together achievements in learning and life – coursework and voluntary/leisure activities – as well as
Needs to be attractive, interesting, easy to use and link with other personal tools
Different permissions can be set for sharing different items with different people at different times, e.g., tutors, fellow students, employers
Interoperability with other systems – so it can be exported once the learner moves on and/or exported to a blog system
Allow creation of a webfolio that can link with other repositories eg Flickr, and authorized with Flickr ID
Accessibility – text to speech?
Management systems to avoid misuse eg as a personal filestore – administrator can keep upload speeds low if necessary
Have a proforma to guide people through an action plan, business plan or promotion plan, etc.
Planning tool – with space for uploads
A profile to rate your own competencies
I'd be interested to hear ideas for further essential features.

One such that has most if not all of these features is Pebblepad
Labels: career management, CV, eportfolios, job application, webfolios

posted by Helen Whitehead 2:36 PM

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Wednesday, 14 January 2009

Saving time and managing information flow

Saving time - vital... Here are some of the ways I'm saving time and managing information flow at the moment:
Creating shortcuts on my desktop to my most-used folders - a no-brainer I think. To keep track of multiple projects effectively I like to keep my files in neatly organised folder hierarchies. But then I find myself taking time browsing through layers of folders to find what I want. So I have created shortcuts to the folders I'm using the most at this moment - key project folders, the Camtasia video I'm working on, the course materials I'm developing, etc.

First thing in the morning I log into the VPN if not in the office, then I don't have to interrupt the flow when I need something from the server, and it's easy to store things on the server rather than leaving them on my hard drives.

First thing I also open a Firefox window with several tabs for my most-used web apps - at the moment typically:

My Google calendar
Wrike task and project management
Sugar CRM
Twitter (or Twitterfox or Betwittered in my iGoogle page when they're working!)
The community I am working on today
Any course I am teaching at the moment
Any course I am taking at the moment (currently digifolios.ning.com)
My blog admin pages
The forum I use most - a small supportive community of fellow elearning specialists

I use two computers at the same time when possible, a desktop and a laptop, then if one is doing something slowly, eg, while a backup is running or a Camtasia video is rendering, I can turn to the other.

I keep up with Twitter and RSS feeds on my smartphone in any odd moments - even in the kitchen stirring dinner...

Now I just need to crack my terrible typing - correcting my typos takes up FAR to much time!
Labels: lifehack, organising, project management, time management

posted by Helen Whitehead 9:58 AM

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