This is the last post for me here on Liquid e-learning. I've rebranded and moved to www.searchfindlearn.com, because I wanted my blogging identity to say a bit more about how I learn. And search find learn reflects my learning process, from when I was little and played with alphabet blocks right through to my adult digital learning journey.
If you're using technology with learners in an effective, experimental or innovative way, I'd love to hear from you. I can blog on www.searchfindlearn.com about your project/website/idea, or you can contribute a guest post. Send an email to michelle.gallen at gmail.com describing what you're up to.
Packt books have published Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner's Guide by Ian Wild. This book promises to help teachers and trainers get "existing teaching material online quickly and easily".
Getting your teaching material online quickly and easily depends on what material you want to put online, and how much of it you have. But you can certainly use Moodle Course Conversion to make the process quicker and easier.
Moodle Course Conversion is written in plain English. It's laid out simply, and takes you through what you need to know on a step-by-step basis. It doesn't get over-excited about the bells and whistles. It gets stuck in right at the start with what you need to know about Moodle and what you need to do to get your course online.
Chapter 1 covers the basics - Moodle history, logging on, editing your profile, deciding your role, and moodle themes.
From Chapter 2, you're creating your courses. You learn about course structure and format, enrolling students and assigning teaching roles.
Chapter 3 focuses on adding documents and handouts, while chapter 4 deals with including multimedia content.
There's lots more - with advice and practical tutorials on everything from how to communicate effectively online to setting and marking assignments.
The book is NOT aimed at techies who are setting Moodle up from scratch. It's for teachers, trainers and lecturers who want to (or are being forced to) convert existing materials for Moodle.
Best way to get a handle on whether or not you like this book's style is to read over the sample chapter pdf you can download from here: http://www.packtpub.com/files/moodle-course-conversion-beginner-guide-sample-chapter-5-moodle-makeover.pdf
You can also learn more about the book here: http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-course-conversion/book. Packt have other Moodle books - I can't vouch for them, but you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-books to check them out for yourself.
I missed blogging about great women in technology on Ada LoveLace day. I was feeling pretty guilty about not participating. Janet Clarey a researcher at Brandon Hall put me on her list of Role Models in Educational Technology and I felt even more guilty about not blogging on the day.
It's not because I can't think of loads of great women I've met in technology (Mary McKenna, Director of Learning Pool, Clare Dillon and Martha Rotter, Microsoft gurus, Jane Hart, Learning and Performance Technologies queen, Fiona Quigley, an e-learning expert in Aurion, Belfast and Sabrina Dent - a crankypants web diva, to name just a few (sorry - I could go on and on).
I also met the inspirational Alison Malloy (Eastman Kodak) at the ACE unConference in Derry - her story of teeter-tottering for years between bankruptcy and riches before selling her company to Kodak was just amazing. But I struggle to name other role models - as did Maryrose Lyons of Brightspark Consulting in her Ada LoveLace post.
Maryrose's post got me thinking. I've got tired of being referred to as the token female for some of the classes, events or talks that I attend. A fellow Girl Geek summed it up comically at a Belfast Girl Geek Dinner - 'Sometimes you just feel like you're the only Girl in the Village'.
It's really not like this always. But some events make me feel a little like I'm drowning in a sea of suits. And because I'm small, stand-up networking events irritate me - there's always a whole conversation going on above my head while I get a crick in my neck from looking up. That's why I'm a real fan of sit-down networking or perching on a high stool to talk with someone - we get to be much more on the same level.
Anyway! Karen Virapen has heard my woes and sent me this lovely lovely Muppet Ladies clip. It has cheered me right up, and given me an urgin to go be a great surgeon! Watch and enjoy :)
Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.
Thanks to Karen Virapen, who is an e-learning guru in the University of Ulster, for sending me this link. It's a fantastic animation, and I just love the way information is embedded throughout the story. It got me thinking about unusual ways of displaying or teaching what we already think we 'know'.
@leelowe, @mairinmurry, @martharotter, @kievia, Christian @silverspoon, myself and one brave male all had good food but much better craic in Madisons. There was twittering, installation and testing of gravity, brainstorming and discussions about networking. A twitter pilgrimage was planned and a red car may or may not have been hijacked.
Girl Geek Dinners are great fun - but it's a fast pace. The pace at the ACE unConference in Derry last week was slower (a good thing for me - I couldn't last three days at a Girl Geek pace). I had some interesting chats there with folk like:
- Paul McLaughlin of Lionhead games
- Ian Hughes (aka epredator) - a metaverse evangelist
- Darryl Charles, a lecturer from University of Ulster with a passion for serious gaming
- John Farren, creative director of 360 productions, an independent production company who are doing some interesting interactive experiments
- Aidan O'Duibhir, director of Grrr Charge Games
- David Wortley, Director of the Serious Games Institute
I got to pitch to a panel of American and Irish financial and business experts, who gave me some great business advice during the formal pitching session and lots more advice in the informal sessions afterwards in Peader O'Donnell's bar.
I've had a stretch of meeting interesting people and talking about new ideas in the last week or so - it's fantastic. My head is bubbling with new blog post ideas after months of feeling like my brain was a dried up pea rolling around in dust. Yay :)
Today we got our 1000th member on www.talkirish.com - over 700 people have joined the community in the last 30 days. Our Irish Word a Day blog is our most popular feature, followed by the forum, then our games, dictionary and media galleries. Over 200 folk follow our Focal an Lae on Twitter (@talkirish) and we're getting great feedback on the content so far...and lots of requests for new features.
It's been a pretty intense week for me, so I'm off out this evening to the Belfast Girl Geek dinner - I'm sure a small glass of something celebratory is a good idea.
After a hectic month organising and promotion, today sees the official launch of Talk Irish with a party in An Chultúrlann, on the Falls road in Belfast.
We've had lots of new members and loads of visitors in the last couple of weeks. We've featured in the Sunday Business Post, SiliconRepublic and done interviews for several radio stations and newspapers. We've still got a lot of work to do on the site, but we're delighted with the number of people who've emailed us to tell us what they love about it.
So I'm hoping the launch will go well today. There are loads of Irish language events happening all round Belfast today - from intensive language courses to plays and performances. But if you're free, and you fancy some fíon, ceol agus craic, drop into an Chultúrlann before 2.30pm to catch Aodán Mac Póilin from Ultach say a few words about the site before I take you through a tour of the features.
If you can't make it, there's still time to brush up on a cúpla focal before St Patrick's day - just visit www.talkirish.com.
Whoo! After far far too long, we've finally launched our new dictionary, vocab learning game and quizzes on www.talkirish.com.
I'll start with our 365 dictionary. It's linked with our free Focal an Lae (word a day) service. Learners can search for an Irish/English term. The chosen word is displayed, along with an image. The learner can see the headword, cases examples and sample sentences. But the best thing for the learner is being able to listen to the entries. This is especially important to Irish language learners, as it's difficult for many learners across the world to get access to Irish language audio.
I have to say, my WordFlash game is my favourite new toy. WordFlash is based on the premise that the brain learns best through repetition, a little bit at a time.
When the game opens, a picture square flashes and an Irish word is played. The learner must click that square. The first square is repeated, then a new square flashes. This continues, and the learner must repeat the chain of flashes for as long as possible. While they play, their brain makes an association between the image, text and audio.
There are two modes - practice and test. But also 2 levels - listen and read. Listen mode encourages the learner to associate the sound and picture, without any text. That's really important in a Celtic language like Irish, whose written form can appear very alien to learners. Learners of Irish frequently mispronounce the words they see. I hope that by teaching them the word sound first, then then find the text easier to read, and have a phonetic system to apply to it.
Our quizzes simply let a learner test the following:
Irish-English text translation skills
English-Irish text translation skills
Spoken Irish recognition skills
All the games plug into our database of Irish words and associated images. I've designed everything so it can localise easily into any other world language. What we're working on now is getting our subscription model up and running - so learners can unlock the free versions of the games.
If you're interested in what we've done and want to get involved or find out more, feel free to contact me - details at www.talkirish.com.
So we're on the shortlist now for an Irish Blog Award. Absolutely delighted that our blog's got this far...and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Saturday. Just wish that the people behind putting it together could be there - I imagine following the event via Twitter won't have *quite* the same buzz!
I thought I'd take a look at some educational content produced here in Ireland. I'm starting with www.homeworkrules.com.
It was developed by RedCobalt Interactive Productions and www.mallni.com in partnership with parents and schools from the Greater Shankill area of Belfast.
www.homeworkrules.com has an unusual aim. It doesn't try to help kids with their homework. It aims to help PARENTS help their kids with their homework. Maths homework to be specific.
Hmmm. Yes. Perhaps a few of you are also thinking surely 2+2=4 no matter if you're 8 or 38. But while the figures and answer might be the same, apparently the methods used for working out the sum have changed dramatically between one generation and the next. So while Dad might be able to give young Jimmy the right answer, young Jimmy's frustrated with how Dad's teaching him, because he is supposed to learn the correct method as well as arrive at the 'right' answer.
Homework Rules tackles fractions. Tough stuff. With a tough audience. But the site rises to the challenge. First things first. This website looks good. It's pretty. It's well designed - slick and engaging. There's lots of audio with well-paced and quick-loading animation. And it's intuitive and easy to navigate. This looks and feels like well-thought out content.
But does the content work? Yes. I hated fractions at school. And I was usually lost no matter now hard my father (a very accomplished maths teacher) tried to help out. But just check out this explanation of Improper Fractions. Simple. Paced. And if you don't get it? Just rewind and listen again.
There are 13 mini modules in the Fractions section, and a further three modules in the percentages section. There is a whole lot of content here. Not all of it is teaching content - there's a lovely support section too that provides tips on reducing stress.
This content seems to be working with a very hard to reach demographic. Getting parents to work online is hard. Getting kids to work online is hard. Getting them both to work online together is hard. And with FRACTIONS??? But apparently www.homeworkrules.com has achieved that.
Homework Rules is a model of accessible content, with accessible alternatives and high-quality print-outs.
The content delivery platform is a slick piece of work too, that could easily be used to deliver more bite-sized modules of content. It would be easy to localise into different languages.
I had a chat with Colette Lynch about how the site evolved. She explained that www.homeworkrules.com was developed as part of the Government’s Renewing Communities drive, as a direct result of parents’ pleas for help with their kids homework.
Colette then talked about how parents were heavily involved throughout the development process. This resulted in the creation of extra tools, like the calculators and conversion tables.
The development team learned all about their users preferences. For example, users preferred to listen to audio explanations and watch the animations, rather than have to read a lot of text. The use of local accents was a real winner for the target audience too. I asked Colette for her final word on the project. She said
“As parental response has demonstrated, Homework Rules is an extremely compelling website that encourages shared family learning between parents and their children, changing what can in many instances be a real nightmare, into a positive experience".
Apparently the site is experiencing high user numbers, but more importantly, sustainable repeat user patters. What does that mean? It means the parents are logging in, coming back, and coming back again. It's nice to hear that something like this really works.
Homework rules is free and accessible to any parent in the UK and Ireland (although the content is curriculum specific to the UK), but has only been marketed to its original small demographic. That seems a real shame to me, as it's beautifully designed and is easy to use. It's world-class content. Go check it out!
Liquid e-Learning has been nominated in the categories Best Technology Blog/Blogger and Best Specialist Blog for the Irish Blogger Awards along with loads of other great blogs, like http://gadgetrepublic.com/, http://www.web2ireland.org/ and http://podcampireland.com/. I'm really chuffed to be nominated - so thanks!
My Focal an Lae blog over at www.talkirish.com has been nominated for Best Use of the Irish Language in a Blog. I'm really excited about this nomination, because this blog has been consuming me recently. I have to post every day, and it requires the creation and co-ordination of audio, flashcards and text in two languages. It's not just the content side that's time-consuming though. I hadn't anticipated how much time I'd devote to encouraging learners to use their Irish in the comments section.
It surprises me how many learners email me directly to try out their Irish or to ask questions, or just to reach out and say 'wow, I love what you're doing' - but don't use the comments section. I'm not sure why. I guess maybe a lot of the people who are using the service aren't bloggers or blog readers - they're language learners. They're happy to get their content delivered to them via blogging, but they're not yet using blogging tools to interact in the way they could - guess I need to work on encouragement and demonstration!
The blogger awards are being held in Cork Airport on Saturday 21st February. Tickets have long been sold out (and I don't have one), but you can register for the waiting list www.awards.ie. Great people who make great sites make for a really great night. Beg/borrow/steal to be there ;)
We've launched our
Irish Word a Day service over at www.talkirish.com. We've also launched some new site features. Check out the Audio and Flashcard gallery where you can download any of the audio or flashcards for use on your pc/iPod/phone.
You can sign up to receive the service by email, or you can just visit the site every day to check out the new word.
Words so far include droim, seangán, bolg and scamall...want to know what they mean and learn how to pronounce them? Visit www.talkirish.com.
We're in the final stages of beta testing our games, dictionary and quizzes. They'll be released in coming weeks.
Well yes. Of course it is. Working in a repetitive factory job or driving a taxi around London will change your brain. But it's still interesting to read this news story on how the the Internet is not just changing the way people live - it's also changing the way our brains work. If you search the Internet or text message, you're making your brain better at filtering information and making snap decisions.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California, argues that this is an evolutionary change. As with all evolutionary changes, there are winners and losers - the winners in the digital evolution will be those who are tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.
So the Geeks Shall Inherit The Earth? It's not as simple as that. Technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity. But it also allows people to isolate themselves and 'live' online. But succeeding in the new 'digital' era will require a mix of traditional and technological social skills.
I know many people who can communicate and connect effectively through blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook, myspace, podcasting etc etc etc. But not all these people can connect effectively in real life. Then there are those who are brilliant at traditional social skills. But can barely type an email or reply to a text.
I learned my traditional social skills in a variety of sometimes challenging situations - by having to attend funerals and weddings, by participating in cultural gatherings such as birthday parties, or through institutions like school and college. Mostly I was guided (or coerced) through these situations by an adult who taught me how to socialise. But I've been learning my technological social skills by trial and error.
Gary Small's conclusion that tomorrow's winners need to be comfortable in two worlds is hardly mind bending. But I like to think that those of us who straddle two worlds, who know how to sit on a bus with a complete stranger and talk about the weather for an hour as well as twitter our way through the US election, maybe we've got a headstart in this race :)
Congratulations to Fís Book Club, who won the Best Education Website at the Irish Web Awards. Fís (Irish for both Video and Vision) is a great little site for teachers and pupils in Irish schools who can use it to upload video reviews of the books they love. Users can browse all the video reviews to see if they can find a great new book to read. Congrats again!
http://www.opensourceschools.org.uk/ is a new site that aims to promote, review and document usage of open source software and tools in UK schools, although I imagine they're happy to include Irish schools.
OSS offers a space where schools can share their experiences of open source software, with the aim of increasing confidence and knowledge levels - they hope thes factors will drive uptake.
Open Source For Schools is just in beta, so they're happy to listen to all your feedback and will welcome and support new members.
They're seeking Case Studies from schools using open source, so if you're in this space, share your knowledge.
I don't know if the UK or the Irish governments have strategies on driving the uptake of OS software in schools...seems like something that might just have got missed out...the government pushes the use of computers in school, and loads classrooms with computers, but is there a strategy on what software and tools are useful?
Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies recently published a list of 100+ (e-)learning professionals who twitter. My twitter feed was on the list. This explained to me why I have suddenly been getting followed by all sorts of interesting e-learning heads from all different parts of the world.
The problem? My tweets were personal tweets, designed to feed into my personal blog. I've been intending to set up an e-learning twitter - two in fact. One for this blog, and a content-based feed for my Irish language site. I'd started twittering for my personal blog just to get a feel for how it worked, before doing it 'professionally'.
Tony Karrer has since reviewed and slammed the tweets from Jane's list as being 'banter' and not something he'd subscribe to. And underneath there are a lot of comments both in favour of Tony's opinion, and against. I don't really get the need for people to decide whether or not e-learning twitterers are good or bad, whether Jane's list is useful or not. Try twitter. Like pistachio ice-cream, you can take it or leave it.
Personally, I'm a twitter convert. I love the way I can connect to people I don't know but have heard of, and learn about their work flow, what's interesting them, and get tidbits about their life. It helps me talk to them when I meet them face-to-face, or to reach out to them on email.
And I think twitter can really add something to my blog. I'm overwhelmed by the sites and tools I've discovered that I want to blog about. My backblog of really great sites I've been asked to review is weighing me down. So I want to use twitter to alert people to those great little tools or sites that I want to blog about, but either won't find the time, or don't need to write a long post about.
I don't have a problem with anyone following the saga of my broken gas boiler as I twitter as michellegallen. But if you'd like to get the fewer and more relevant e-learning tweets, try following searchfindlearn at Twitter.
Donald Clark has written a nice piece for Line entitled '10 facts about learning that are scientifically proven and significant for training'.
There's nothing terribly new in the article, but it's great to read and remind yourself of these key factors in learning. I've printed the list and pinned it up to focus me when I'm planning work. Synopsis below, but I think you should go read the article - it's short and snappy.
* Spaced Practice - we learn through practice, little and often
* Cognitive overload - too much, too long!
* Chunking Information - less is more
* Order - learn stuff in a useful order
* Episodic and semantic memory - teach for the types of memory we use
* Psychological attention - hello? anyone out there?
* Context - learn on the job/task
* Learn by Doing
* Understand peer groups - teachers and parents don't matter. Peer groups do.
* Murder the myths - bye bye to learning styles, left-right brain, NLP etc etc
Line have also published a series of white papers - I've not read through all these, but they look useful:
Rapid development of e-learning - risks and opportunities
Making e-learning a viable business tool
Understanding the culture of e-learning
Podcasts and learning
Beyond blended instruction
Web 2.0 and learning
Thanks to Deborah Limb of Learning Pool for the link!
Liquid e-Learning has been shortlisted for an Irish Web Award - Best Education Website. Yay :)
busuu.com is yet another social network for language learners. It's a start-up based in Madrid and is still in beta. Users can access all content for free at the moment, but there's no indication of how much it might cost when it leaves beta behind.
So what's on offer? Well, busuu.com offers the usual big-hitters: English, Spanish, German, and French.
I have to admit that one of the reasons I'm reviewing this site ahead of so many others in my 'backblog' is because busuu.com is soooooo pretty. It captivated me visually. I wanted to get in and learn more about the site. And busuu.com made that easy.
It's simple to sign up. You're not browbeaten into giving away too much information - just enough to be useful.
Once you're in you've got four main tabs to navigate with:
- home
- friends
- inbox
- busuutalk
The friends, inbox and busuutalk tabs are self explanatory.
On the homepage you can see your friends, online users, recommended units, 'winners' and are prompted to take part in activities. Or you can click a tree (oh go see...it's pretty) to access the 'language garden' of your target language.
Language Garden
The busuu.com language garden lets you add units to your learning journey. You can study up to 5 units at a time. The units are pretty standard e-learning with a five step process to learning:
1 Vocabulary
Here you learn key vocabulary by watching a slideshow with audio and text. Hardly high-tech, but OK.
2 Dialog
Here you listen to an audio file with a transcript of your target language.
Alongside this, you can see and listen to an English translation.
After this, you test your knowledge with three multiple choice questions.
3 Writing
Here you can write a piece of text and submit it for peer review. Text entries are reviewed and rated.
4 Speak
In this section, you can speak to native and fluent speakers. I'm antisocial, so I only checked the feature out for how it looks - I didn't attempt to speak to anyone! Luckily, just looking completed this section for me, so I didn't have to do anything ;)
5 Test
Here's where you'll get a multiple choice picture and sound file quiz - with some very strange audio feedback in the form of cheerful or very ominous piano notes!
THE END
After you've completed a whole unit, it disappears from your learning garden and you can add another unit.
busuu.com - so what works and what doesn't?
The e-learning is not very high-tech. The slideshow method of learning a word and image by viewing and listening to about 20 words at a time doesn't really work for me. Our working memory can grasp about 7 items at a time. I'm not sure how a complete beginner could remember so many words all at one go.
Another problem with this type of picture, text and audio-based learning is that it's hard to tell what some of the images are. I ended up getting answers wrong in the test section just because I couldn't remember which image meant what. You end up trying to associate the images and audio file as much as you try to learn the meaning. It's hard to get around this.
Like a lot of the other sites I've explored busuu.com doesn't really let you practice half enough. It's a quick introduction to language but I don't know that you get to do enough for the new knowledge to be retained.
It doesn't offer one-to-one lessons with qualified teachers.
Verdict?
There's nothing very new here. And there's a lot of competition in this space now. But there's nothing terribly wrong with what's on offer at busuu.com. The site is pretty. It provides decent e-learning. It doesn't force the learner into linear learning, which is great - it's really good to be able to select bite-sized chunks of learning. It seems like a friendly site...a place you could make friends. However, I see busuu.com very much as a support to classroom-based learning. It seemed like a good way to revise or refresh knowledge, to test where you are.
Why are they called Busuu?
Apparently Busuu is a language spoken in Cameroon. A study conducted in the 80s showed that only eight people still spoke this language.
Liquid e-Learning has been longlisted for two Irish Web Awards - best education website and best technology website. I'm pretty awed to be longlisted once, never mind twice. I've not been blogging much for the past month because I've been ill (I really want to blog illness and e-learning - it's amazing what you can learn about the human body online). But wow. Double longlisting!
You can check out the other longlisted sites here and if you fancy a good night's craic, you can book your ticket to the awards ceremony on 11 October in Dublin here.
Apture provides a rich communication platform that allows publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat pages of text into multimedia experiences. I'm just a new user, so my review is going to focus on what they say, and what I've experienced so far.
You must sign up for apture, and then insert a line of code into your blog/website. Apture then detects you're using it, and opens a small editing toolbar, which allows you to highlight words in your content, and to search for related content.
Once you find the content, you can link to it. When a user visits your site, any linked content can be opened in a small window that you can reposition anywhere on your browser. Try it.
Apture Search and Content Selection
I've not used Apture for long - this post is an experiment in using it. But one concern I have is in how Apture searches for and suggests content for embedding. The default search provides content in these categories:
- video
- images
- reference
- News
- Maps
- Music
- Documents
- web pages
Good, useful categories. But the content it suggests within these is pulled from specific sites - so for images, you get flickr, yahoo image search and wikipedia (could they not get a deal with google images?). For reference they use
wikipedia, crunchbase, imdb and amazon. For news it's the Washington Post, BBC and BBC archive. I'm not sure how they made their selections, but I'd be concerned about a narrow search that might return narrow results.
Using Apture
As far as I can see, Apture lets you add all this rich media after you've posted your blog. I like this. Often I publish a blog a couple of times because even if I preview it, I don't get it quite right until its live. And with Apture, I can add content and tweak what appears. I like that approach.
Apture and E-learning
Apture makes it easy to prettify and enrich your blog posts. But a really interesting feature is apture's wiki mode. You can set this so that anyone with an apture account can come in and edit your content. I'd love to see how a group of students might enrich a basic text article - and what they'd learn in the process of doing so. The student as author is so much more engaged than the student as consumer.
Consuming Aptured Content
I've not been on very many sites that use Apture...so I'm testing it here and on my personal blog. It may happen that Apture is just plain annoying, rather than useful. Or it may happen that it is useful to blog readers, and keeps people on my site for longer (which would be of benefit if I made any money through that!).
Making Money with Apture
Apture claims that publishers can 'monetise' content that otherwise lies dormant but I couldn't quite figure out how. Apture themselves seem to be trying to make money through an ad system. Again, not sure how it works. And it doesn't seem aimed at bloggers. One of the reasons I've steered clear of ads on this site is that I would prefer control over the ads that appear. I want to know that the products or services that appear on this blog are good. However, I often recommend books, services and products to people. If Apture had a means for me to embed a link to the point of purchase, then perhaps I could earn a few cents from the recommendations I make. That would be nice. Sigh.
I recently read about Naomi Gadian, a medical student with dyslexia. She's taking legal action to try and prevent the use of multiple choice exams as part of doctors' training.
Naomi believes that multiple choice exams discriminate against dyslexics and wants the General Medical Council to scrap them. If she wins her case, all medical schools might have to drop the exams.
But it's not just medical schools who'll have to change. Institutions across the world rely on simplistic multiple choice quizzes to test learner's knowledge. It's how the UK government tests learner drivers. So as Naomi Gadian's solicitor, John MacKenzie, has pointed out, "Every professional body or employer who relies for a professional qualification, or as a promotional gateway, on multiple choice questions is heading for a fall."
Is it true that students with dyslexia are discriminated against in multiple choice quizzes? I'm not sure.
Students with dyslexia are usually allowed extra time in written exams. Multiple choice quizzes are no different. Students with dyslexia get extra time to complete these. However, a student with dyslexia may struggle in particular with multiple choice exams due to the particular eye control it takes to read AND select the correct option.
It doesn't state anywhere if Naomi is struggling with a paper exam or a PC exam. But I'm assuming it's e-learning. Today, most e-learning content produced by professional bodies or employers is screenreader compatible. It's designed to be accessible to blind or visually impaired students. In fact, any learner can choose to read text with the assistance of a screen reader. The correct answer can be typed in. There are lots of ways in which a student with dyslexia can get assistance in completing a multiple choice exam to the best of their ability, so I'm not sure how this case will proceed.
However, Naomi doesn't just seem to be questioning how the questions are delivered. She's also questioning whether testing a doctor's knowledge using multiple choice questions is valid.
The BBC quoted Naomi as saying "In normal day life, you don't get given multiple choice questions to sit. Your patients aren't going to ask you 'here's an option and four answers. Which one is right?'"
I hope not. Any time I've been to hospital or my doctor's surgery, I've given the doctor as much information as I can about my problem. Then I've expected the doctor to generate a list of possible options, which they may or may not share with me. I get to wait as they select the option they think is the most likely one.
So it seems to me that multiple choice questions are not the best way to test doctors for this type of knowledge. Multiple choice questions ask a question and provide the user with a list of possible answers.
However, user input quizzes (whether spoken or typed) more accurately reflect the situation Naomi describes. But would she be happier if user input questions were used? User input questions simply ask a question and require the user to come up with an answer. User input questions are an awful lot harder than multiple choice questions. It's sometimes hard to find the right answer when staring at a blank sheet, or at an empty screen. User input questions reflect real life.
I think that the real reason much e-learning relies on the multiple choice question format is that it's easy to write. And it's easy to assess. And I think multiple choice questions are easier for learners to pass - the odds of getting it right are usually 1/4. Much e-learning is over-reliant on multiple choice quizzes. It's easy. It's sometimes lazy.
But ban them and what happens?
You might not need 100 useful web tools, but you'll probably find one or two little gems on this list sent to me by Fiona King.
The list groups tools according to the type of task in hand (podcasting, mindmapping, notetaking), but has also organised them for various learning styles.
If you're an auditory learner who learns best hearing text rather than reading it, you can scoot down the list and check out sites like readplease.com, which can read aloud text for you (and is apparently also a great proof-hearing tool).
I was in Morocco recently for a holiday. It struck me that in the family homes I visited (Fez, a village near Khénichét outside Sidi-Kacem, and Casablanca) that the dominant technologies were satellite television and mobile phones.
The TVs always seemed to be tuned into American movies (I only saw horror or action movies) or programmes like 'Real Life Survival Stories' or 'The World's Dumbest Criminals' with Arabic subtitles. TV was watched passively, with little comment.
Some of the phones in use were modern, some were ancient bricks. But every house had at least one mobile phone, and it was obvious every adult aspired to own one. Everyone expressed great admiration of the phones we had with us - not for what they looked like, but much more for what they could do - surf the Internet, send and receive email.
I visited a small village school in the North of the country. The classroom was basically equipped - desks, books, a blackboard. There were no computers. In the family homes I stayed in, I saw just one, quite old laptop. And Internet access wasn't cheap - I saw one package advertising access for approximately 20 euro per month (the average daily wage in Morocco is about $3.50).
Education is hugely important to the average Moroccan - it can greatly increase a person's earning power. So acquiring knowledge is important. In classrooms where books are precious and computers are non-existent, it seems to me that mobile phones allied with an affordable data plan could become a leading learning technology.
Learners learn best when the knowledge is necessary, relevant and timely. I know that I use my mobile phone on the go to get the facts I need for the situation I'm in or am about to face.
And these facts aren't delivered via bite-sized SCORM/AICC compliant e-learning modules. They're freestyle - thrown at me by Google and consumed in text format. And no matter how low-fi this solution is, it fits my needs and it works. Of course I'm not earning any points in an LMS. I'm not getting tested on my retention. But I'm getting more done, and doing things more effectively in real life.
I guess I'd like to teach the world to browse, with affordable data plans...
I'm in New York from tomorrow for 8 days. I'm there to talk to Irish language learners and teachers about what they use to learn Irish outside of Ireland. I've been working really hard to get the podcasts, flashcards and quizzes ready for launch on www.talkirish.com - I haven't got an official launch date just yet, but I'll email everyone who's already signed up and post here as soon as I do!
Seems like Irish is a hot topic now, and Des Bishop, the Irish-American comedian, has a great show called 'In the name of the Fada' which tackles the national problem with the national language. Catch up with the show online at RTE.
Des's website, www.desbishop.com, has a link to some interactive Irish learning materials. The materials certainly look good, but I haven't had a chance to test the content out yet, and I'm not sure at what level it's aimed at. If anyone else has tried it out, let me know!
