University-Level eLearning in ASEAN
This article briefly discusses the trends of eLearning in ASEAN. The author argues that moving towards eLearning model in higher education is to deal with the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and General Agreement on Trades in Services (GATS). US universities mentioned in the article include Jones International University as a first accredited virtual university, the University of Phoenix as the largest, and Capella University as the first to enter NASDAQ.
The university that I’m working, Assumption University, aims to offer eLearning to 100,000 students per year with its College of Internet Distance Education. The number of students reminds me U of Pheonix…
Reference: Charmonman, S. (2005). Univresity-level elearning in ASEAN. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on eLearning for Knowledge-Based Society, August 4-7, 2005,Bangkok, Thailand
http://cide.auplus.au.edu/images/21/PP11-fin-039-11.1-11.6.pdf
Possible selves at match.com
A conversation with
Ben yesterday kept me awake until now, 3am. The social network phenomenon is really fascinating. I keep asking myself what should I feel and react if, say, I meet a couple at a party and the greeting goes, ‘hi, I’m Jose and this is my wife Santalusia… we met thru match.com.’ Yes, it happens to be normal but I am amazed.
Ben’s notion of ‘ideal self’ is interesting--customers would best illustrate themselves online--and I couldn’t agree more. When you put yourself up there, it’s might not be your yourself, but it’s someone you want to be, someone perfect.
If wannabe-self matches with another, is it likely that both of them can help each other to reach their future selves? Does the online matchmaking help people get married faster, and make marriage last longer? Do 29 Dimensions of Compatibility at eharmony really help? As they claim, ‘90 eHarmony members get married every day.’ How many doesn’t get a chance? How many of them separate?
Our circle
According to the review assignment, I began to picture what we discussed in class and in our student meeting some time ago. In class, Dr.Kara said, ‘the school is getting better because of student’s contribution.’ In the meeting, Erik mentioned, ‘the school is counting on all of us.’
As I read the articles from our friends, I learned a lot from them. Also I could see a possibility to working together, sharing knowledge and resources.
If we know our circle and their interest, then we could begin to ‘communicate.’ The class presentations from our friends allowed me to know their expertise. The articles helped me understand their in-depth findings in certain area.
I would have been in pains if I have to learn all about constructivism and student-centered issues, but have to sit through hours of lecturing, read what I have to read, take exams that don’t mean anything to my goals. Luckily, I’m thrown into a great community of lifelong learning. I am writing to remind myself not to take this fate for granted.
Yes, I believe that destiny plays some parts in our life. It has many lines to say and is definitely a good listener.
Experience the Dark Side
Authentic, technical professional development 04.0:Finally, I put all my learning materials about technical professional development online at Grove account; this account costs $15/semester and allows you to use script languages, such as perl or php. You can also set up Database with Grove (no additional cost). The problem is you have to work with telnet and command line (I found it difficult and inconvenient).
My plan for presentation, I shall call it “
Experience the Dark Side.”
In short, I’ll let all you guys work on the materials, learn the possible attacks, and finally try attacking, tweaking my site (at grove
http://grove.ufl.edu/~vasa/).
There are two popular attacks that I have learned and will discuss about in class.
Cross Site Scripting (XSS): this vulnerability involves sending a script from one to another HTML page. Unfortunately, user might unknowingly pull such script to their site. This weakness seems to cause problem in RSS and atom feeding since user might retrieve malicious script from feed providers.
SQL injection: Structured Query Language (SQL) is a language to manipulate relational database and it’s possible that hacker might use it to retrieve sensitive information. I set up pseudo records and channel that you can attack, retrieve sensitive records.
This is a self-paced lesson; if some of you have time during thanks giving or if you want your kids to experience the dark side, please don’t be hesitate to jump in.
Comments are welcome.
Thought from our folks: Information Literacy and Technical skill
To me, information literacy is a skill to select relevant information. I pulled the definition of visual literacy from wikipedia, and thought that we can simply replace the word images with information.
[Information] literacy is the set of skills involved in the interpretation and criticism of [information] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_literacy)
Essentially, we can say that to be information literate is to be able to read information.
Flash tutorial:Concerning issue Dr.Kara mentioned in class, ‘whether we should learn new technologies to develop courses or just hire a professional.’ I would say yes and no for this question.
I read this dialogue from the book, but can’t remember which one. It goes…
------
customer: how much does a web site cost?web designer: that's depends, what do you want the site to do?customer: i don't know, what can you do wit ha web site?web designer: that's depends, how much do you want to spend?------
In a way, this dialogue happens when it comes to technologies. Customers don’t really know what they want; they don’t know how far technology could take them to. That’s why consultant makes a fortune consulting. I would say ‘yes’, we should know and educate ourselves new technologies, and ‘no’ we should not go all the way from scratch to master a certain product, just know enough to talk with professional personnel. I’m sure that by now, Mary would comfortably talk to the instructional designer at her library, and be able to move to other multimedia editing tools using existing experience from Flash.
Thought from our folks: Video streaming for corporate training
As I dug in the e-learning topic in educational setting, Michael’s presentation last night made me think how business and educational profession look into the same issue. As Michaels mentioned, company like IBM save a lot from e-training. This is what companies want, and sure it’s what universities want. Frankly, there’s no difference at all between the two. University of Phoenix Online is making a fortune from their business, most recent fiscal year revenues exceeding one billion dollars (Farrell, 2002).
I wonder how corporate deal with training results though, should they be job performance evaluation, probably from supervisors, or colleagues. I also doubt how ‘constructivism’ could play its role in business. Probably executive is not a big fan of this epistemology.
Reference:Farrell, E. F. (2002, October). U. of Phoenix sees surge in revenues and enrolments The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved online at http://chronicle.com/.
No significant difference phenomenon
I tried to look into asynchronous online learning so that it would bolster my literature review in the area. I followed the link from NSD site to Google scholar and think this is the best one I could find.
The study reports that there’s no significant difference between online and face 2 face classes using the same instructor.
The retention rate was identical, while the attrition rate (drop out) of the online course is higher. The study indicates that traditional students tend to drop out more than adults in both settings.
The study examines learning styles of the students, and finds that two-thirds of each group were visual learners. However, the result shows no significant difference among different learning styles.
What I like about this study is its conclusion, ‘this study provides one more addition to the growing body of literature that asserts the quality of online learning is as effective as FTF learning.’ Also it claims that ‘the major activities [of both settings] were similar in effectiveness… suggest that FTF activities used in this course may be transferred to online courses with resulting similar learning for the students.’
Ultimately, it’s not the methods of delivery that we have to worry; educators should make the most of whatever resources they have at hand. Oftentimes, we don’t really have a choice, do we?
Reference:Neuhauser, C. (2002). Learning style and effectiveness of online and face-to-face instruction. The American Journal of Distance Education, 16(2), 99-113.
Social Network
It's been an interesting year in technology. Nintendo invented a video game you control with a magic wand. A new kind of car traveled 3,145 miles on a single gallon of gas. A robot learned to ride a bike. Somebody came up with a nanofabric umbrella that doesn't stay wet. But only YouTube created a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and grok one another on a scale we've never seen before. (Time, 2006)
YouTube is Time’s Invention of the Year for 2006 not because how it was created, but how it changed our Internet society. People show, create, or found their identities in YouTube. Others have been fooled (by lonelygirl15). Quality isn’t everything, as Time said, ‘The yardstick on YouTube is authenticity.’ This phenomenon reminds me WoW issue, the image quality of the game is far behind virtual reality Technology, but it’s enough for players to immerse themselves in these digital worlds. YouTube videos aren’t professional, but good enough to convey message, and sensation.
Educational value: To become a video blogger, you’ll have to learn a lot about video editing software, screenplay, and public speech. Yes, it’s authentic, but you don’t want to embarrass yourself by talking wordily and pointlessly in front of the web cam and eventually in front of the largest public network.
References:Best inventions 2006, YouTube. Retrieved November 7, 2006, from TIME Web site:
http://www.time.com/time/2006/techguide/bestinventions/inventions/youtube2.html
