Friday forums at DistEd in Madison 2008

A forum titled The World of Web 2.0 in Distance Education featured Paul Kim (Stanford), Marilyn Lombardi (Duke) and Mike Simonson (Nova Southeastern). Simonson discussed the myriad technologies that make up Web 2.0, particularly those dealing with social networking. He suggesting that it is the responsibility of those involved with institutional distance learning to investigate these new technologies to determine their applicability to the classroom and to teaching. This tied in with an article handout titled Will You Be My Friend (Simonson, 2008).

Kim demonstrated one of the earliest 3D gaming environments that brought back fond memories of Duke Nukem. He had developed a medical office environment for students to navigate, interact with patients, and respond to symptoms. It looked quite advanced for the mid-90s.

Sites that were mentioned during the presentation included:

• wiziq.com: a site to develop and teach online
• croquelandia: a 3d world similar to Second Life
• Two other sites have been lost forever to crappy handwriting.

The 11:45 forum featured Curt Bonk and George Siemens, two speakers I always enjoy listening to. The session dealt with academic writing and research using Web 2.0 technologies. Mention was made of faculty making videos of lectures and posting to Youtube for student viewing. Once again a number of resources were mentioned throughout the presentation including:

• Confessions of a Acu-Fan: blog of Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and advocate for gaming in education.
• slideshare.net: site for uploading and distributing slide show presentations
• elearnspace: Personal blog of George Siemens. EXCELLENT!
• plos one: Open source scientific journal for peer-reviewed scientific and medical research
• diigo: a social bookmarking site. Users can annotate Web pages and add sticky notes which can be shared with others
• publicationshare.com: freely available articles dealing with online learning. Primarily from Curt Bonk. Great resource.
• e-Learning World: home page of Curtis Bonk
• Theory and Practice of Online Learning (Anderson & Elloumi, 2008, 2nd ed.): freely downloadable version available free of charge. Print version available for purchase. First edition (2004) also available for download.
• Lulu.com: self-publishing. Create your book. Upload to Lulu. Select your cover art. Publish. Sell.