Audience response systems

, / by https://blog.itcilo.org/author/wambeke/

How to interact with a huge audience in a lively way? Audience response systems are used a lot nowadays, either through handheld transmitters (clickers) or through mobile phones. Through an input device participants express their views in complete anonymity, and the cumulative view of the group appears on a public screen. You can either introduce statements, multiple-choice questions, opinions or open text inputs from your participants. The collective feedback is immediately available to everyone and can be the start of a lively discussion.

If these systems support active learning approaches and improve learning outcomes further research still needs to determine.

According to EDUCAUSE two important features we might take into consideration:

Clickers or mobile phones:

– provide a mechanism for participants to participate anonymously.
– integrate a “game approach” that may engage participants more than in a traditional classroom discussion.

Also for evaluation of learning events or courses they might be useful. The immediate results are visible on screen and can be the input of a more in-depth discussion that might generate more qualitative input for your evaluation.

Try it out with a small group for free: Live audience polling : http://www.polleverywhere.com

Audioblogging ?

, , / by https://blog.itcilo.org/author/wambeke/

A lot of colleagues expressed their interest in blogging lately but had some concerns on the ‘time’-issue. I do agree that time is always a challenge and will integrate in the future blogposts some ideas that take time into account. The first idea is audio-blogging. Writing an article is time-consuming but what about recording audio-posts? Some ideas:

– interviewing subject matter experts who come to our Centre as resource persons
– document best practices and success stories of participants in their own words
– create mini audio sessions which are related to the course content
– let participants record mini audio journal entries with lessons learned from the training
– have people introduce themselves with a small audio file in the beginning of our on-line courses

(ideas inspired by Michelle Martin)

Audioblogging might be something to consider, especially if recording is even possible with your own mobile phone. This week we have planned to interview Marc Steinlin who will be facilitating the Open Space at the upcoming LED-conference. This audio blogpost will be available soon.

[polldaddy poll=1018926]


Learning and visitor nr. 1000

/ by https://blog.itcilo.org/author/wambeke/

The cloud of words this month is completely focused on LEARNING. This means that one of the keywords of this blog is fully integrated in most of your contributions and reflections. The last months have generated more than 20 articles from different colleagues and the blog is reaching visitor nr. 1000.

Blog action day : “Poverty”

/ by https://blog.itcilo.org/author/wambeke/

Thousand of bloggers will unite today to discuss a single issue: ‘Poverty’; the main objective of the Blog Action Day 08. Join and contribute your ideas !


mission to learn

/ by https://blog.itcilo.org/author/wambeke/

Professionals not only keep track of to-do lists but also of to-learn lists.  This new concept is explored in the Learning Circuits Blog and it might be an interesting question to explore whether to-learn lists could engage people into continuous learning.  There are some of the learning-circuit questions that could serve as food for thought:

  • If you have a to-learn list and are willing to share, and willing to share how you work with that list, that would likely be helpful information.
  • As Knowledge Workers, work and learning are the same, so how does a to-learn list really differ from a to-do list? How are they different than undirected learning through work, blogging, conferences, etc.?
  • Are to-learn lists really important to have?
  • Should they be captured? If so how?
  • How does a to-learn list impact something like a Learning Management System in a Workplace or Educational setting?
  • What skills, practices, behaviours do modern knowledge workers need around to-learn lists?

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Marketing distance learning courses

/ by https://blog.itcilo.org/author/wambeke/

We (enterprise development) have developed a distance learning course on Value Chains and are now running it with support from DELTA. We had more demand than we could respond to in this first version and do now have a waiting list for the 2009 edition.

While I think it is an interesting product, I consider that this one was not the most outstanding course compared to the other Distance Learning courses of the Centre (we could have a more intuitive web platform etc.). So I have tried to figure out what made demand so relatively strong. My preliminary answer (that I thought might be interesting for those of you that are working on distance learning platforms) is:

by Merten Sievers

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