5 Steps Towards New-fashioned Online Learning

Welcome to 5 Steps Towards New-fashioned Online Learning, a blended learning workshop for university educators that provides a hands-on exploration of new ways of conducting Internet-enabled learning. The workshop is designed and run by Matthew Allen, known online as netcrit, who is an ALTC Teaching Fellow. Matthew's project, Learning in Networks of Knowledge, involves discovering and developing university educational approaches that work within the real spaces of the Internet, rather than the formal environment of learning management systems.

This workshop is an interplay between co-present interaction (in a shared physical space) and online interaction. Following the instructions on this site, you will prepare for, engage in and collaboratively reflect on some possibilities for online learning in knowledge networks.

On this workshop site you will find, as well as this welcome, detailed instructions for the five steps you will work through. You will also find the collaborative 'blogshop' space where a lot of the interaction, sharing and reflection will occur.

So, this site will be used as part of the workshop in various ways - both as the workshop instructions and also the 'doing' space which exists partway between our physical interactions and our online networking.

Participating in this workshop will involve the following 5 steps:

1. Establishing an online identity using Gmail which you will use as the basic 'connector' and 'communicator' between several distinct web services and applications.
2. Establishing an account for Posterous: you are already here reading this posterous-based site, but you need to join as a contributor (use your gmail account): you will then begin contributing to the blog, both by commenting, and by posting.

3. Exploring a specific 'web 2.0' application, including creating an account with that application, to be able to explore it and report back to the group (via this blog) some brief observations about that app.

4. Undertaking a two-channel conversation about what you are learning and the questions it raises: air your ideas and problems / back-channel your responses with Today's Meet.
   
5. Creating a simple powerpoint summary of your views on elearning, publishing it on Slideshare and adding it to the blog.

More detailed instructions are provided for each step.

Three things to remember when starting:

1. A blog is not just an 'online diary': it is a highly flexible, posting-based system of presenting and managing online content, alone or in a group.
2. New approaches to online learning using (so-called) web 2.0 approaches involve activities at several different places online, but they interlink
3. Choosing how and what to do with new online learning involves developing skills and expertise in knowledge networking, enabled by the Internet: it is not just using software!

Stand by to play; have fun; and remember that you can't break anything :)

Matthew Allen

5 steps towards new-fashioned online learning by Matthew Allen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at knl.posterous.com.