Doug's 565A e-portfolio

I think one of the most important features in an LMS is to help enable communication. Learning is a social and cultural experience, and many people learn best through interaction with other people. I think it is relatively rare that a student optimally self-learns through books or other static media. This applies more to younger students than older or mature students. With this in mind, I was quite interested to learn about synchronous and asynchronous communication abilities for LMS.

Much of the information in the Synchronous Toolkit is well known to students and educators. Tools like iChat, Skype, MSN are used routinely by people. However, it was interesting to learn about all the different SCT that are available as modules in Moodle. The Toolkit highlighted 6 different tools, of which three are free. As well, Moodle has its own built-in chat module.

I find it a bit difficult to find out the real capabilities of these different tools because it really requires some practice with other people. Perhaps I will be able to convince a classmate to work through some of them together. I’ve used Wimba Classroom a bit, and I can see it being a really useful tool. I’ve also explored DimDim and it looks promising.

One thing that is a bit daunting is the plethora of choices available. When deciding to choose a technology for group discussion/interaction, there are many routes a person can take. So far I have found myself defaulting to “lower tech solutions,” such as a simple chat module (chat in WebCT/Vista). The knowledge in knowing that every user can be set up and using the chat with one click of the mouse is reassuring. However, I believe that with a small investment of time, other tools can be more beneficial over the medium to long term.

I was checking out some math, physics and standards based grading educational blogs when I came across a screencast of a teacher who used DimDim. Check out the screencast here and see how it went. More info from the lesson is found here.

I found the DimDim to be a bit slow paced, but maybe that’s just the nature of the beast when trying to broadcast live video. Dan, the teacher, also lamented that he found formative assessment very difficult. He really had no idea what students were “getting it” and which ones weren’t. He later found out that some students felt very rushed and wished they had more time. These are things the teacher would pick up on instantly in the classroom, if it was face to face.