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Nigel Robertson's Page
Profile Information
- Relationship Status:
- Married
- About Me:
- Learning technologist, elearning designer, I remember being a geographer(!), caver and speleologist, taxi service for boys sports, recent em/im-migrant
- Website:
- http://easegill.edublogs.org
- Education
- Craigmount High, Edinburgh
Lancaster University, BSc (Hons) Physical Geography
University of Central Lancashire, MSc Multimedia Computing
- Work Experience
- Gardner, caving instructor, GIS technician, shop manager, geography technician, learning technologist, elearning designer.
- Peronal Interest
- Caving, cave and karst science, geomorphology, walking, cycling
- Course Interest
- connections
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© 2009 Created by Javed Alam on Ning. Create a Ning Network!
Comment Wall (3 comments)
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Thanks for the references. They are useful.
I think the reason I was able to use outside programs was that being a college professor I do have lot more flexibility in how I conduct a course. Also, having a good reputation with IT staff helps. They let me do pretty much what I want to do as long as I do not mess with their systems that are extremely secure.
To give you an example just yesterday I was trying to use my tablet pc on the local wireless network. It was off the network for about 2 months. It needed every single patch from Micrososft and all the security patches from Cisco what they call it clean access. It took almost half a day to install all these security stuff while the same work was done 2 months ago on the same tablet PC. Also,it is a nice Toshibal tablet PC and worked just fine for few years as long as I kept it off the Network. the moment I brought it on the network with all MS/Cisco patches the system has become slow in some instances it takes a while before things load now.
I think security and virus protection is making MS OS unworkable unless they do anything about it soon Apple is going to get their market share except few people who are resistant to change.
Nigel
Thanks for the kind words. It was my attempt to use web 2.0 to teach about web 2.0. I think it worked well in the sense that I learned a lot about web 2.0 myself in the process of teaching it.
I am not very fond of LMS. I find them too confining although I have access to one at the school and I have followed the development of sakai, Moodle and Atutor as they went through different versions.
I think we are heading with plug and play version of web development through widgets, open social and Google friendconnect. Once these application become available I think it will be very easy to create a web page by Individual teachers who are tech savvy to create their own web page that will provide the same functionality with flexibility in adding and subtracting functionality that we currently have in LMS. Even the platform code of Facebook is open sourced so is for the Ning. Also, Google is providing free web sites and app development environment. All of this should really have a very interesting implications for the future communication/computing environment for teaching.
I teach Engineering and so far I did not have any concern from the administration in choosing Ning as an alternative to WebCT. I think as long as student go along with this arrangement I do not see any issues at least from the my administration.
I had some concern regarding privacy in using this and still thinking about it.
I hope this answers your question. Let me know if you want to know some thing else because I see very intersting thing happening where even the open source LMS fails to keep up with the Social Networking platform growth and I consider virtual learning environment primarily a SN environemnt in which learning occurs.
About "Open Professor" I want to do a blog post once I some time. It will be very interesting to see how professors open up their classrom to other intersting parties. There are few profs I know who are moving in that direction.
Thanks for joining Infotechtools network. Feel free to browse different section of the network. You will find the course related information in the intro section of the forum. That should provide you with the web addresses that were used during the course and the student work that was done using blogs.
I used many assessment methods and one of them is by using Voicethread and it can be found at this web address
http://voicethread.com/share/124542/
Please feel free to ask any question you may have.