Rheinard’s UB Blog

Every once in a while a technology comes along that changes the way we learn and teach. A few years ago there was sudden explosion in the use of Microsoft’s FREE Photostory software. Educators soon caught onto the idea of digital story telling and now many teachers, K-12 and further education, are using it in their delivery as a manner of creating quick resources.

Some creative uses of using the software also emerged. Teachers accepting assignments in the form of digital stories; students providing feedback in the form of digital stories; etc. Some of these creative uses can even be seen in our own organisation in the Automotive and Building & Construction departments.

But what if we could take that technology and hand it over to our students… for immediate contribution, feedback, questions and discussions. What if we could make our digital stories truly interactive…?

Now we can, enter VoiceThread.com. VoiceThread offers a way for us to tell our stories (or deliver explanations) in a whole new interactive way. We upload our Excel, Word, PowerPoint documents, images, videos narrate over them and then hand it to our students. Our students can then comment in the form of text, audio and even video leading to some very interesting interactivity.

Another incredible feature of VoiceThread is the ability to doodle (draw) on top of the documents, pictures or videos we’ve uploaded. The best way to explain how this all works is to have a look at a few of the public voicethreads that are hosted on the site.

With a free account you can setup 3 VoiceThreads to which you can invite contributors or have it public. With an account you can also add multiple personalities. This allows you to, in a class situation, login your own VoiceThread account and assign a personality to each of your students (the don’t need their own accounts!).

Give it a try today and experience a whole new way to tell your stories.

***UPDATE***:  Colette Cassinelli from edtechVision has given a great link in the comments to her wiki where she is collecting examples of how VoiceThreads are getting used in educational institutions.  It has some great examples! Thanks Colette.

I read a very interesting post on one of my favorite e-learning blogs: “What We Can Learn About Instructional Design From Post-It™ Notes” (The Rapid E-Learning Blog).

I could write all about it here, but it is a really good read and would highly recommend it if you’re in the area of designing instruction. The reason this post suddenly hit me was because I was engaged with some staff yesterday in a Blackboard training session. I could’ve stood there all day and go through the ins and outs of the product, but it was more practical to give them a rundown of what the product is capable of; giving them a bit of a play and then more so find out more about their delivery strategy, target audience and their available time. Through this I now have a better understanding what their needs are and how we could cut down the learning curve to help them get their course on-line quicker. (Now I’ll just pass this information on to their ELF [e-learning facilitator]).

In reference to the article, yes there are many under-pinning “need to knows”, but ultimately in vocational training we want to see people performing the tasks they would in the workplace. The most embarrassing comment from the posted article is the following: “The entire course will take 60 minutes to teach what her co-worker could have taught her in about five” (Kulhmann, February 20, 2008)

This is just a bit of a reminder that sometimes, maybe we just need to get to the point

I’ve just taking a nice tool called eXe for a “test-drive”. It is a tool that helps you to quickly create new learning objects (or LO’s). Before I jump into the reasons why I liked eXe, I’ll first give a bit of a rundown on LO’s.

A learning object is a bite size piece of learning instruction (or an activity) that can be reused. This saves us from having to create the same resources over and over again when we’re creating courses on learning management systems (LMS; like Blackboard, which is our LMS here at UB). But rather than just having our resources in bite-sizes for reuse, using learning also allows us to share across schools and departments.

Here is an example: We all know that OH&S is now a part of all training packages. Some elements of OH&S may reoccur over many different courses from many different departments and school. A really good example of this is the topic of ergonomics (this is especially true now that most industries are using computers more and more, even those industries that thought they’d never use it). If a department was to create a simple LO outlining ergonomics in general, they could upload that LO directly into Blackboard. They could also now share that LO with their colleagues, who can then also upload it into Blackboard. To now give back to this initiative that was shown by the department another department can produce an LO (for example, Ergonomics and VDU’s), upload it to Blackboard and share it with other departments. Collectively as an organisation we could now potentially sit with a whole unit of learning about Ergonomics that was inexpensively created and that can be reused (in whole, or in little bite-size chunks).

Another benefit of LO’s is that it is LMS-independant. I’m sure there were some of you that went through the whole WebCT to Blackboard migration that found it very painful that your once proud course is now fragmented and, in the worst case scenario, not working. Having content created in smaller chunks as LO’s means that in the event of a new LMS in the future, your content is secure and transferable.

What about those Training Package updates? Certainly the changes from 2000 to 2008 has been significant in most training packages - updated for mayor competencies, updated again for employability skills, updated because your industry has changed. Whole courses in this regard has been made redundant and that content is now sitting on someones shelve as a memory. If the content was created in smaller chunks, an update to a training package may still have caused some redundant information, but a lot of the content could still be up to date and reusable. Re-invent little wheels, not the whole car.

The good news is that creating these LO’s is not hard at all. There are several tools out there that allows you to create LO’s. Some are high-end and expects all of us to be web-designers to be able to create content (and costs a lot of money), BUT some of them like eXe is intuitive, customizable, scalable and 100% free!

With eXe, if you can copy and paste (Shortcuts: Crtl-C and Ctrl-V), you can create a Learning Object in no time. It is an active project and the developers are continually adding to its development. It’s completely open source, meaning as the end users, we too have a say in the development, and if you have the skills even be part of the development. Even better, it runs on Windows, Macs and other open source environments.

Over the last two years I have been looking at Learning Objects and their standards. This was as part of projects as well as my general interest in creating shareable content. I have trialled some commercial implementations (such as Wimba’s Course Genie, now known as WimbaCreate) and some reputable free software such as the Reload Editor. I’ve even created my own software that aided me in learning more about the standards and here is how eXe stacks up.

It does not have the same work-flow offered by WimbaCreate, which allows you to create LO’s straight from Microsoft Word. WimbaCreate has a strong learning curve, but once mastered, would most likely be the most efficient way to create LO’s. But if you want to start creating LO’s today, eXe is perfect.

eXe does not have the scalability (yet, its in development) offered by the Reload Editor in regards to creating meta-data for specialized implementations (aka content for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework’s, AFLF, LORN datatebase), but eXe by far makes the process of creating LO’s more enjoyable and changing the meta-data is easy.

When it comes to in-house software, no other software allows you the flexibility, but in my case. I am a one man developer with closed source, little time and have had no trial. eXe has been exhaustively tested and new features are added with every release.

I don’t have a rating system, but seeing that it’s valentine’s day today, I’m giving eXe 4 out of 5 hearts!

Kudos to the development team!