Tools of eLearning

As eLearning goes, I have only been use to one type of delivery and that is through either screen capture or video like tutorials. I have seen a few tutorials on YouTube before, but have never actually actively used them as a resource. So I decided to check it out more, especially since this might be something that I may be using in my site.

YouTube E-Learning and Bandura’s Classic Research on Violent Television and Aggression – This article was very insightful. I never really gave much thought into things such as this one, that the different uses of video contain the potential for vicarious and observational learning. Though the insight came with the added information about violence and aggression. Although I had never gave it much thought, I had noticed something as such at one point not long ago and the psychology of it all actually does make a lot of sense. My understanding of eLearning has opened up quite a bit now in that it is very perceptual and relative to the viewer, so trying to convey a certain message will actually prove to be a challenge if the viewer is outside of the taget audience.

With the things that I found on YouTube, activities of all sorts can be accomplished for eLearning. From tutorials, training, motivational, exercise, magic, video blogs and others.

YouTube eLearning – This site was also very useful in giving reference on how to use YouTube for eLearning as well as some articles.

Mashups eLearning – The elearning Learning site is very resourceful. Like the link just above I found a lot of information on Mashup and its uses in eLearning. I did not even know what a Mashup was until after checking out this site and a couple of others. Mashups eLearning Tools gives a really good definition, well that made sense to me anyhow.

It would seem that Mashups could prove to be very resourseful for the learner to collect information, identify the useful information, organize, and communicate information to others by collecting content from more than one source and using it as a mapping service to show points of interest and related information. This also seems to help the teacher/instructor using the Mashups to present information, observe student work, and assess work and information.  I guess it is kind of like an aggregator for related information? That combines data or functionality from one or more sources into a single integrated application. I may not acutally use something like this time around for my project, but I can see where it would come in handy, especially since Google Maps seems to be a type of Mashups, as well as iGoogle and Digg.

As for other options, I have had experience with them before, but never thought about them (conciously) as eLearning. Such as Twitter. Again, it never dawned on me to think of Twitter as an eLearning tool, yet as a member of Twitter, I actually follow Sitepoint.com – a resource for web designers, developers and dealmakers – and I read their post from time to time about tips and tricks, or latests developments, and articles. Actually, it is quite cool. I have been on Twitter for sometime, but had only used it as an status update area for a while and upon farther research I found that there are Twitter’ers that are dedicated to specific subjects such as, case in point…eLearning 3.0 Blog, that give you resourses to free online universities, tutorials, and a number of other things.

I am personally still trying to figure out how I would use some of these tools in my project because I think that they might be rather useful. Using YouTube of course is probably the most likely, but guess we will just have to find out. Perhaps discussion of others findings might lead me to something better.