eLearning: iTunes University

So for my short course choice I went with Apple’s iTunes University. I figured that not only can learn something for my class assignment on taking an eLerning course, but I could at the same time learn more about my newly acquired iPod Touch.

At this particular moment, I have not been able to access “iTunes U,” because I do not have access to the iTunes interface/library to pick a particular course. However, as I understand it, a lot of them are videos (since the tour of iTunes U describes the course materials as episodes). So with some searching around on my iPod, I found some educational training videos on numerous subjects from Language learning, how-to’s, political, cooking, and much more.

My first experience was tapping into Mike’s Physics <–web presense. Here there are only a few courses available at the moment, but as Mikes explains it, “Physics is beautiful, breathtaking, and awesome.” A place to learn about physics in a “Dirty little easy to understand physics reviews.” He forwards the training with a the idea of the videos as not being meant as stand-alone learning tools, but complementary aids to class lectures and a good textbook.

Now, I already know quite a bit about physics, as I have studied it extensively in the past and still use it quite often today (maybe not in as much depth, but still use it). In either case, I was able to follow along with example problems that had step-by-step solutions on solving things such as the basic material covered in studying physics such as the top focus being “how things move.”  The three main things 1. position, 2. velocity, and 3. acceleration were covered in the seven minute training videos that I watched, of what they are and how they relate to one another.

The way that he explains the definitions, with images and graphics, to get the point across are done quite well. I was able to follow along quite well and it was kind of fun to get a refresher of simple equations to help one determine the average acceleration and how it equals the change in velocity divided by time. Then I was taken through a few example word problems to be solved on how to find how fast things move and the time it takes for them to get there, such as the average velocity of Usain Bolt (the Olympic world record runner) during the race.

All in all, this was a very pleasent experience. I will be attempting the iTunes U later on this week, just in case it is different. So, I guess check back to this entry for an update.

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.

Project Proposal: eLearning Design

Well since this is not completely set in stone yet, here is what I have so far for my project proposal. Man I hope I am not going to kill myself by going overboard on this one.

The Problem to Solve:

Most things I have noticed seem to be a design problem, so I would have to guess that whatever problem I will be solving will be design related. So the proposed problem set for solution is to create, improve design, and over all build for a site for learning the basics traditions of learning Italian sword play. As far as I know, a site like this one does not exist at all really. There is a lot of information out there about what to do and the resources to find them, but nothing that is really formidable in how to do it and I shall attempt to make it so.

Topic of Learning:

The proposed topic to learning is going to be based on learning the basics of footwork, posture, and sword work in Italian Sword Play/Fencing. The information will be derived from translations of an Italian manuscript that was written in 1409 by Fiore dei Liberi called the Flos Duellatorum (Flower of the Battle) .

Technologies to use for eLearning project:

• The platform will be web based
• Possibly even be accessible by mobile as well (need to figure out how to do that)
  
• Programming and markup languages that will be implemented will more than likely be a little bit of a lot of things such as: XHTML, CSS for style, possible JavaScript, quite possibly Action Script (for Flash). The technologies used will depend on the final decision on the delivery of the information.
• Perhaps video as it is a very visual activity.
• Authoring Applications used will be possible Flash, more than likely WordPress, XHTML, CSS, maybe JavaScript

So there you have it. Again, hopefully I will be able to do this one effectively and without too much trouble.

eLearning

*Update* – I was wondering why I no one was responding to my post these past couple of days. Apparently when I thought I had posted all it did was save a draft. Weird. Anyhow, please read and if you have any comments I welcome them. Thanks!

There must be something wrong with me. Why do I just never seem to get it? I just cannot seem to find anything of interest. I mean, I love learning about things, but I cannot figure out anything that is of any interest to me at this particular moment other than the things I am learning at school…and I find it pretty stupid to do an eLearning site on eLearning. Ahhhh! Very frustrating! It feels like I should actually know something about whatever topic I am researching.

I have aimlessly visited a hundred sites and more tying to figure out something that would be cool to learn, but none of them have sparked interest in much of anything. I guess I have so many things on my plate that it really is difficult to care about anything else. I would rather have direction than such an ambiguous find something of interest. I wish people understood how much I do outside of school.

Anyways, I digress. Here are some things that could possibly be ideas for projects, but honestly…I cannot figure out how to make any of them work interactively and within a reasonable amount of limited time that I have to complete it. Hopefully this is what I was suppose to do for this assignment.

• Ellusionist.com – The biggest thing that I have been trying to learn for a very long time, that has taken a back seat to school is learning magic tricks. I bought hundreds of dollars worth of training videos  just before starting back to school from this site, which is the best magic learning resource to me, that I have barley ever had the time to even look at them, much less learn anything from. Ha…most of them are still in there packages. Though again, trying to think of an interactive way to make a magic site with any reasonable amount of time seems rather out of reach. This is something that I would love to do, but the only way I can think of it is by video and I feel that I would have to actually know how to do at least some magic to make video worth while.

• Photoshop Tutorials – this site has always been a big resouce for me when learning how to do certain effects in Photoshop as well as for digital photography. I have even contributed a few tutorials to this site a while back ago, but like everything else on this site, it was not very interactive, rather screen captures with text explanations.

• Good-Tutorials – has also been a big site for me when learning about different Photoshop, Illustrator, some CSS, and even JavaScript and they have a lot more other things to learn through tutorials. They have very good and crips looking images and good explanations for learning in the tutorials.

• Lynda.com – In the past, Lynda.com was the #1 place that I visited for tutorials on just about everything. The best thing about the tutorials here were that most of them were all video tutorials and for me being a visual person it is easy for me to follow along and see how someone else did the effect they were going for.

• Online Italian Help – I have been learning to speak Italian for a very long time, especially for translating 16th centruy Italian fighting/combat manuscripts. This site is a great resource to learning a lot of the basics. In fact a lot of the learning is actually interactive. So, how do you redo something like this that has already been done. I kind of have this idea that if it is not broken, do not try to fix it, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, languages have it all taken care of when it comes to eLearning. Just take a look at Rosetta Stone.

• Flash & Math – Flash & Math has been a nice resouce for me in the past as well for learning things for Flash and ActionScript. Flash has always been something that I wanted to understand better, especially since I have a past interest and experience in animation. The ActionScript was someting that both made sense and did not all at the same time. Also the use of the stage and trying to figure out how the animation worked has always proven difficult to me. I am continually amazed at a lot of the things that some one has made and even more so when I get the oppotunity to see how they put it all together. How did they do that? What thought process led them to put certain elements in one scene and others in another scene to make a single piece?

So there you have it. Thanks for painfully making your way to the end of this poist. The only thing I think I could effectively do, is a tutorial, but with such a high expectation to make them better and more interactive, I have no idea how I would go about doing that effectively since I have had experience doing them one way. Hard to expalin, but I have a point there somewhere. I guess I just do not currently seem to have the imagination for coming up with anything clever. If any of you have any ideas I am most certainly open to what ever you might have. See you all in class.