The Perfect E-Storm by Bonk (2004) was a little dated, but express 30 great tools to in online learning. The PowerPoint http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/ was extremely helpful in updating the tools and their rankings over the last three years.
I found interesting that Bonk previously was a corporate controller and CPA. What a change of careers to go into psychology. I agree with Bonk's comment about the number of tools being overwhelming and teacher and students becoming hesitant to use them.
I found the Bonk's article very interesting. The area of the article that intrigued me was the Reusable Learning Objects (RLO)- taking a small chunk of learning content from one course and reusing it or repurposing for other modules, courses, or programs. The word proprietary came to mind. Searching the Internet I found a lot of articles on proprietary application as it relates to RLO. I personally was thinking of instructors who take a proprietary stance over the curriculum they have developed.
At the institution I work at, you are sometimes paid to develop new curriculum. The college has now started an open portfolio, where instructors put curriculum to share with others. Although just this semester, I was assigning a new instructor to a course and requested another instructor to help out the new instructor with curriculum. The veteran instructor had been paid to develop the curriculum for the college but refused share it and a small battle followed.
I can see myself using RLOs by collaborating with my peers to determine what chucks of learning content should become RLO for our program and determine where and when they should be used. I can see a great learning unit or activity getting repurposed many times in the same program, and over the two years the students become bored and the learning unit or activity is no longer engaging.
Ok I found another interesting topic from the article- Etexts. My professor from last semester polled students whether they want him to use Etext, and the answer was a sound no. I personally can not read a large amount of text on the computer. I did find an article that listed a few other disadvantages of Etexts.
The article highlights Etexts typically expire after 180 days and students will no longer have the resource. Textbooks typically can be resold and Etexts can run in the $70-$120 range and can not be resold. Also instructors mentioned that individuals using Kindles did not have a page number to reference only a long location code.
The positive part of an Etext is that if you are only using a few chapters it may be a go choice, and of course Etexts are green, unless you print everything out like I do.
There are a lot of technologies that we can use, but we must understand our students an the advantages and disadvantages of using the technology.
Ah Ha moments
Using Jigsaw in the College Classroom article reminded me of how I currently use an affinity diagram. The variation of having students read the same material, but react to it from a different perspective was something new I can use. The article From Puzzles to Problems: Assessing the Value of Education in Business Context with Concept Mapping and Pattern Making also provide another approach to using Concept or Mind Mapping, which was to have each participant independently come with the category headers to gain individual perspective of what has been brainstormed. I also liked the idea of using the concept or mind mapping to do a before and after assessment.
Example of Concept Map for Project Management.
Discussion
Using Inspiration for concept mapping was pretty easy. I liked the idea of outlining using the software and then creating the map. One student mentioned a Quality Matters as curriculum design tool for online courses-Link posted in the links area. Also there is a link to a PowerPoint on the top 100 technology tools for 2009.
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