Portals on Emerging Issues in Educational Tec...

Portals on Emerging Issues in Educational Technology
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During the Masters of Distance Education Course, MDE663, taught by Terry Anderson, students study, create, and then tag a learning portal overviewing a new technology that has large potential impact on distance education. The target audience for these portals are other Masters level education students. The page below links to the portals created by students in the 2003 - 2006 sections of this course.
2003 Projects
Educational Standards - This site overviews the many new standards evolving to facilitate interoperability and structured search, retrieval and inference in educational applications. Distribution and Open Source Issues - (Site not available) This site overviews issues related to the use and development of educational resources and software under various Open Source licensing agreements.Learning Objects and Repositories  - This site presents the ideas and concepts of learning objects and provides tours and evaluations of some of the major learning object repositories. Semantic Web News - (Site not available)  This portal uses a newspaper metaphor to explore educational perspectives on the emerging semantic web.
2004 Projects
Mobile Learning - Mobile and other forms of pervasive learning promise to increase access to learning anywhere/anytime. In addition they allow learning to be contextualized in real work, entertainment and learning places.Social Computing  - Social computing increases the capacity for learners to control, filter and qualify the human interaction that supports their learning.EPortfolios  - E-portfolios provide technology and standards whereby learners can document, archive and present their learning accomplishments that span their formal education, workplace and informal learning lives.Games and Simulations - These tools not only motivate and inspire learning effort, they also create opportunities for social interaction and learning in very complex and unstructured domains.
2005 Projects
Podcasting - The capacity to easily and very economically broadcast and distribute audio educational content, creates new opportunities to create or augment distance education programming.Copyright and Free Education - This portal overviews major issues, laws and developments in copyright relevant to (especially Canadian) educators.Design Patterns: This site takes up the architectural work of Christopher Alexander on Patterns. Pattern theory and best practices are overviewed with examples of patterns in e-learning.Next Generation LMS : (password lms) This site overviews developments in product and thinking about Learning Management Systems.
2006 Projects
CIDERPedia : This wiki on the CIDER site overviews educational features of wikis and invites users to contribute to a wiki focused on Canadian distance education.RSS and Syndication: This portal overviews the important role of Rich Site Syndication in gluing together the emerging pieces of Web 2.0 with an emphasis on educational applications.Immersive Worlds : This portal examines and demonstrates examples of multiple user simulation environments such as SecondLife and Active Worlds.Net Pedagogy This portal discusses and demonstrates many of the new pedagogies designed to exploite the affordances of the educational semantic web.
A paper describing the process and outcomes of this innovative course is available from the following link:
Anderson, T.&Wark, N. (2004).   Why do teachers get to learn the most? A case study of a course based on student creation of learning objects.   e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology,   7 (2) Retrieved Nov. 2004 fromhttp://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/Vol7_no2/FullPapers/Anderson_Wark.pdf .