Trends in eLearning – Week 4 – 18 Feb 2014

This week we did a recap of a few issues before our presentations next week!!!! Kevin asked everyone to confirm which topic they picked and what they were using to present the information. I informed him I was looking at the Virtual assistant and I wanted to use an animated presentation website as I have seen other presentations done on them and liked them. The two choices were PowToon and Moovely, I choose Moovly as it could do upto 10 minutes where PowToon was restricted to two minutes.

There were a lot of discussion around different topic such as gamification, big dta, MOOCs, 3D printing, outsourcing memory and social media. One thing I looked at afterwards was a TED Talks video of Daphanie Koller (2102) explaining Coursera, why it was established and the benefits of it. I found this video very informative.

Social media was another big discussion point and the value to education. Yes students use it all the time but do they want to use personal accounts for college reasons? Teachers and Lecturers also need to decide if they want 1000’s of students friending them on their personal accounts or set up a college account just for that. It is not disputed that social media has a role to play but clear boundaries between person and college space will need to be drawn up. This discussion reminded of Marc Pransky’s 2001 article Digital Natives Digital Immigrants that argues that the education system is not designed for today’s students but we should not assume they have exposer to technology because they were born in the 1980’s.