Michelle’s OLFPZ

For the UBC Reports beginning of the year issue, I and several of my colleagues we asked to provide a brief “look ahead” to UBC in the next 5-10 years. Each of us took a slightly different perspective — mine of course being learning technologies.

Kind of fun, but somewhat intimidating – I’ve not been doing a lot of writing lately and I’m feeling a bit rusty. Guess its time to correct that!

My thanks to Brian Lamb for talking this through with me, helping me refine some of my thoughts and contributing a few of his own to the conversation. Mostly, I’m just happy he did not laugh out loud at my prose….

If you are interested… “Growth of Online Personal Learning.

My other colleagues contributions are well worth a read, covering science education reform (Carl Weiman), community service learning (Margot Fryer), teaching (particularly the influence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Gary Poole) and student leadership (Allison Dunnet). The are accessed from the Home Page (top right).

Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed provides a commentary and pointer to Mathcasts.org, “…a wiki that is collecting examples of student produced screencasts about math related topics” (Weblogg-ed description).

One of the interesting links on the wiki is to the Whiteboard Movie Making Book book by Tim Fahlberg, Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska, and Graeme MacNeil.

Like Will, I really like the idea of student-driven, student produced work. Nothing quite like peer examples to inspire others. I can see an excellent tie-in with e-portfolios – a way for students to demonstrate that they understand a subject. In UBC’s context, this makes me think of our LEAP project – – particularly the online tutoring component.

The Student Society at UBC, the AMS, offers tutoring – and over the past year, in conjunction with the LEAP partners, including the OLT, has been developing out online tutoring. We’ve had some challenges with graphical tools for things like Math and Chemistry. I can see developing some screencasts as a nice complement to the live tutoring. The tutors themselves may be able to use this method to demonstrate their abilities by creating some of these (particularly if they have an e-portfolio).

Hmm.. more interesting, perhaps, would be to have this as part of student tutor training. Even if they never published them, they could practice their tutoring by stepping through problems. Plus they will have picked up some good technology skills. Very cool.

I can see this extended beyond math into chemistry and other subjects like this really easily.

This site is a treasure trove for faculty as well. We all struggle with the “how-to” pieces of our teaching. Kind of interesting how the technology is bringing us back to capturing the dynamic nature (and I am not being sarcastic) of the chalkboard and/or overhead projector.

Hmm, looks like a new workshop in the making for an upcoming e-learning institute…

Back to vacation….

Well, Novak blew my mind the other day by introducing me to Net Vibes, an online portal that takes advanctage of AJAX’s capabilities. Imagine a portal where you can drag and drop the channels to different locations on the page. VERY cool.

Of course, this program I am using now, Writely (www.writely.com ) is also quite a find. The purpose of this post is actually to test out the integration with our Movable Type instance. So Web-hosted service Writely talking to our instance of Movable Type. Lets see… what will happen?