http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/10/brandon-hall-network-nicely-done.html

The £5.65m OpenLearn project is backed by a US charitable foundation.

Project director Andy Lane said: "We are encouraging learners to become self-reliant, but also to use online communities to support their learning."

The website will initially have some 900 hours of study in a variety of topics - from access to postgraduate level - using the Moodle "virtual learning environment".

Read full story from the BBC.

University of Arizona students are learning how to build online business communities using technologies often grouped under the controversial and problematic Web 2.0 concept.

As the latest buzzword, the term Web 2.0 has become obligatory in the marketing initiatives and advertising campaigns of many Internet companies in recent years. Along the way, it has turned into an overused, cliched, and vague term.

This didn't deter the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management from naming a new course being offered this semester "Web 2.0: Maintaining and Developing Online Communities."

The undergraduate course attempts to teach students how new online services like wikis, blogs, and social networks, along with related practices like content tagging, syndication, and categorization, can help companies create communities of clients, employees, and partners.

Developed in conjunction with IBM, the course doesn't focus on the technology behind these new services, but rather on their business applications to foster online collaboration. As such, the course is aimed at students of marketing and management of information systems, and not so much at aspiring computer scientists.

"We're focused on the user/consumer-driven Web economy," said Andrea Winkle, the professor teaching the course. "We're helping the students remember that wikis and blogs are tools and that tools will change, so they need to think about [using them] to build communities."

Building Web 2.0-based online communities can help businesses create new business opportunities and improve customer relations, said Rawn Shah, a community program manager at IBM who helped Winkle develop the course and acts as a regular lecturer. The University of Arizona students are learning how to effectively plan, create, maintain, and promote online communities that yield tangible business benefits, Shah said.

Successful completion of the course requires students to use Web 2.0 technologies and build online communities that engage students from a local high school. The class has been split up into groups, which have in turn met with the 60 or 70 participating high school students. The university students will be evaluated according to the level of traffic and use their online communities generate among the high schoolers.

The course ends in December but will be offered again next semester.

technorati tags:web, 2.0, University, learning

Blogged with Flock

technorati tags:MP3, podcast, learning, community

Blogged with Flock

The Intouch site has been made available to a small group for around 24 hours now. Even within that time some excellent feedback has been received!

Generally the site is coming across as quite clean, simple and relatively straightforward. I think some further support pages are required but I believe that becoming comfortable with a site like Intouch is probably more a psychological leap of faith than a familiarity with the site controls and features. 

There's still much to do but I think we are at least off the ground. 

In this the final edition of Go Digital the progress of the UN's plan to connect every village in the world to the internet by 2015 is discussed.

I discovered this World Service programme only recently. For a global perspective on digital developments, including how agencies are bridging the digital divide this is recommended.

The programme is available as a podcast. The latest episode is (hopefully) embedded here for your to download or listen online.
[You do not have permission to access this file]

The recents announcements from Reuters and Channel 4 news that they were opening offices in Second Life prompted a whole lot of interest in the office here.

Mostly bemusement I have to say but perhaps also a sense that here was an opportunity. Further investigation revealed that there are 17 Universities and colleges currently delivering learning within Second Life. Wow! What else?

How about this - Sloodle    A Moodlebased LMS supporting learning activities that take place within SL. It had to happen.

This page is the development wiki for Sloodle - 'Second Life With Moodle'. "Imagine a Moodle course that, if you wanted, could turn into a proper 3D interactive classroom with all your Moodle resources available to your students in the virtual world." This is very doable, since you can import external objects (such as videos) into Second Life. To me, the greater challenge will be fusing an open source LMS into a commercial 3D environment. But hey, it might work!

Who'll be the first to build a virtual library of journals and articles that Second Lifers can read in SL and link out to the real world? 

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/10/why-wikis-are-conquering-enterprise.html

From Tony Karrer:
On ComputerWorld, ran into an article IBM: Tapping Employee Brain Power you may find the print version easier to read (and on one page). The article mentions something that I had heard about from Tony O'Driscoll at IBM, but had not seen in print:

IBM’s new values, which include putting client needs first and fostering innovation, may seem obvious, but Truskowski says the participatory, grass-roots means by which they were developed gives them credibility with employees — something they would have lacked if they’d been developed by “a senior executive sitting in Armonk.”

Armed with the freshly minted corporate values, senior management charged business unit managers to find and close the gaps between those values and actual business practices. To help with that, IT rolled out in October 2004 a so-called jam ­— a worldwide brainstorming session that Truskowski describes as “a blog on steroids.” It drew ideas from 33,000 employees, and IBM later implemented the top 35 suggestions as determined by an employee vote.