Wednesday, November 14, 2007

OpenEdu Week 12: Comments for Week 11

I feel it is a very good progress for this class now. I could concentrate on my own thoughts on the reading and not waiting for quoting others’ ideas last week; and I can take my time this week read people’s postings they’ve already finished by last week. Not in a rush, better comments to classmates’ postings.

The first posting I had read last week was from
Greg’s blog, and I already had a long thought in my last week posting. After his reflecting this week, I come up with a few more ideas, “we haven't found an effective piece of instruction could fit for all cultures in the world for now. But I think this is a good trend that many people like us are working on the innovation now and ideally one day everyone in the world is able to share some instructions. Maybe it is just what I hope to happen in the future.”

In Karen’s posting last week, she thoughts it was a time-waste thing on discussing what the term learning objects means, spending more time on developing some useful open educational resources is more meaningful. She also came up with a good idea that increasing the awareness for the OER movement and its potential to help fill the content in K-12 education. I do agree with her opinions, and I think struggling on new terms which may have the same meaning as the old terms in the innovation is useless. We need pay our attentions more on the content, learners, and outcomes. As I mentioned last week, in my country, lots of people have heard of the term of open education, but many of them misunderstand the content of it. Then we need to find out how to correct their concepts of open education, and help the teachers participate on the innovation.

Thanks to Houshuang for introducing the new software Moodle and ATutor. I checked those links and I think those software are similar to the WebCT or Blackboard which we are using now for other classes, the difference is whether need login with password or not, of course, you have to pay for the courses first. I would rather use blog or wiki which are very popular now instead of struggling on some new software which not so many people are using for now. Maybe I am not right because I still don’t know that much about the software he mentioned. I also would like to know why he thinks learning objects is always open, how does he define learning objects?

Another post I have read is from Elisa. She indicated that, “Openness, localization and technological improvements are the paths to follow for the future to solve the problems of the state of the art of learning objects.” And she details on each improvement. I do like when she said “Localization also implies refocusing on the learners' needs”, I haven’t thought about this when I talked about localization earlier. I also agree with her on your last paragraph. Learning objects have not died and it takes time to even figure out what the exact meaning of it. But I don't know if it is useful and worth the time to do it.

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