Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog

We all grew up playing and loving the classic game of MadLibs! 

If only there were an electronic way to play by yourself… oh wait! There is! Story Blanks is Learning Games For Kids’ homage to that great old game from childhood. The twist on our version is, of course, that you can play it all by yourself and still be just as surprised by your own story as you would if you had a friend asking you for the parts of speech.
Play Story Blanks on Learning Games For Kids and enhance your love of learning about language.

It’s sunday morning, it’s very early, I’m sitting in my garden. It’s very quit, the only thing I hear are birds. Three weeks of holiday lay before me, a moment of contemplation. What is it all about?

The question in the title of this blog comes from a conference on Management and organisation I attended two weeks ago.  And it is a very good question. Unfortunately the conference focussed more on how we learn and not on the why. So I didn’t get a clear answer.

A day before the conference I attended a meeting of the BVLT (the Dutch industry organization for e-learning companies). Since Ed Botterweg left Stoas I represent Stoas in this body. There was a very interesting discussion. The BVLT stands for ‘Industry organisation for Learning Technology and the question was, does Learning technology describe what we do?  Are we not just e-learning companies, should it be E-learning technology or is it about the learning solution we deliver.  Why do we work in the field of learning, what is our added value, what binds us together? More or less the same question as at the conference: “When learning is the answer, then what is our role in it?”

Now a week later and sitting in my garden at half past eight in the morning it all seems very clear. It is not about technology, that is a means to enable learning and not a goal. Learning is also a means, I don’t learn to learn. I learn in order to change, to develop. There you have it,  it is simple as that. We learn to develop and we as a company are facilitating a process of development of people. So it’s not about the content, not about the technology not about the solutions but about people, the process and about development.

Therefore I propose that we change the name of our industry organisation to BVLD, which stands for Industry Organisation for Learning Development. Maybe I have to change the title of this blog in ‘Change to develop’.

© rcp:240610:a0000

It would be most useful to potential users of an Open Educational Resources (OER)  to know about any similar or related works, or to see the ‘family tree’ of the resource, just by clicking a link. Re-users or creators of derivative works would benefit themselves, new users and  ancestral authors by continuing this linkage as they evolve the material.

There are a lot of very rigorous methods for storing information about  a resource developed my technologists and librarians, but I’ve developed a simpler idea that lends itself more, I hope, to the OER ethos.

It’s there to be shot at so please go ahead.

http://icesculpture.wordpress.com/make-evolved-oer-discoverable/

Great example of a PLE.

[video] Personal Learning Environment of TU Graz – e-Learning Blog.

I have a new Journal Article published with Ralph Commins – ‘British Council, Work Based Learning Research Centre and Islamic University Gaza e-Learning Workshop: Five Years On
ISSN: 0013-1962, Englewook Cliffs – USA

Particle Technology- Filtration from EngCETL on Vimeo.

This is a classic example of quality material that required legal processing and technical.