VLE or not to VLE?

Written on 20:18 by Unknown

I cant believe i am writing this post! I am a big advocate of the traditional VLE and have long since seen the deeper benefit of a carefully managed resource to help enhance teaching, learning and assessment. As a student myself I have seen other VLE's in action and also my job affords me the luxury of seeing other efforts across the region. I like the fact that you can manipulate the platform to meet your needs and use a variety of tools to better improve the features offered such as quizzes, online lessons and good integration with videos, photos and HTML etc.

But this is the problem. To better improve. As a lecturer and living in a fast moving technology based world I don't want better, I want best and I want it now! Furthermore the time and effort and potential cost put into shaping this environment is vast and generally creates a 'Marmite' type of appreciation.  VLE's divide staff teams and also does not offer a consistent approach for learners and its no surprise that Ofsted have started to chip away at the value of VLE's and have released an E-Portfolio of their findings from the past 3 years. It can be found here.


I could be here forever discussing the range of fantastic free resources for e-learning that are available on the web, that can be used in better ways than those present on a VLE. Google Docs for instance can be used in dozens of collaborative and sharing ways which resolves issues about sharing documents with learners. Furthermore it allows use of easily created forms which can be adapted into quizzes and populated to a spreadsheet for tracking purposes. If sharing resources is a must then Dropbox or Google Drive is of real benefit and if you want to share videos then uploading content onto Youtube and embedding on a group page is a must. Let's not forget Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook to name but a few that will allow you to create a dialogue with your learners. Other pages like Slideshare, Prezi and Animoto give a tutor the platform for presenting lesson content and as with many of the aforementioned they are also available on most main mobile devices and operating systems. With free web-hosting or running a web-server, hosting other packages is breeze too.

In short, times have moved on and perhaps the time of the VLE has come and gone. Its successor, 'The Cloud' has made it's battle cry, loud and clear. Perhaps as we increasingly live life in the cloud, its time for institutions to make that leap?

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Digital Hoarder

Written on 06:26 by Unknown

Digital Hoarder

Recently I went through my back up disks in order to see what I had that I could use now and also I wanted to check my data back ups. I haven't got anything fancy, just an 80gb usb drive and a 120gb FireWire drive which  I use one for backing up my music and photos and the other for my documents, files, work related things and the odd movie here and there. Normally I think I am quite an organised person but the other day I had a trip up to the loft and discovered the extent of my other hoarding!

There is certainly a lot of sentimental items in there but the majority of things are just random things that I think ' oh I'll use that again one day, best keep hold of it!'  Yeah right! They have been in a box for several years and I've always felt comfortable in knowing that they are there just in case. However when you move hose or need to make room for kids something has to give, hence a de-clutter in preparation for the car boot season.

So I got to thinking about the sort of stuff I had lying around on my hard drives and seeing if there was anything of actual value or had I become a 'Digital Hoarder'? As it turns out there was a whole host of random things such as old ticket receipts in PDF from several years ago, an occasional music program that would only work on Mac OS 9 and assorted music, photos and documents. Now, I have plenty of spare storage space and these files are doing no harm but I had a dilemma as to wether delete them and feel cleansed or to keep them just in case? Now dilemma number two. Would I miss them and maybe If i wouldn't, could i capitalise on them, perhaps financially. I'll manage to shift half the stuff in the loft and put this towards something useful but what about some mp3's I don't use or the odd teaching document that someone else might make use of. There are current wranglings about wether you can sell your used mp3's and I'm sure there could be much controversy over it but how about a digital car boot where you can sell on things that others may find useful?

Are you a Digital Hoarder? The answer is probably yes but I think there are ways to make this easier by transferring things to the 'Cloud' or even sites like YouTube or Flickr and leave a legacy at the same time. Oh and the other day I found a box of old back up CD's (remember those!) I wonder what's in there!?

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