[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Tom, Frank and all ..

As one remembers this thread started regarding an investigation into how
speedy and widespread NBN broadband could, and will, assist Au education. 

Certainly a noble cause and good on you for investigating such scenarios.

And might one suggest that major benefits of the NBN on Aussie education
may well be with regard to non-institutionalized, self-directed-learning.

As one example, MIT OpenCourseWare <http://ocw.mit.edu> units are freely 
available for anyone to pursue ... they aren't distance learning classes, 
there is no instructor, no contact with MIT, no credits. And the courses 
are designed to be stand-alone offerings .. not requiring any additional
materials for learning.

And as the NYTimes notes .. "MIT OpenCourseWare has continued to grow in
popularity, with 9.6 million visitors last year, and tens of millions of
files downloaded from the site, from YouTube and from iTunesU."

But *VERY FEW* of the people accessing the courses are Australian. We do 
not even rate a mention on the world map of MIT OCW visitors noted here:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/year-
end_stats_from_mit_point_to_increasing_popula.php

And, given the demanding-on-bandwidth requirements for these MIT courses
one would suggest broadband is vital for an effective self-participation. 

For example, "MIT OpenCourseWare has published five OCW Scholar courses, 
the first of twenty such courses that will be published over the next 
three years. These courses have been designed to support independent 
study without the need for additional resources, and include multimedia 
such as video and simulations." 

And have a look at the new courses http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/ocw-scholar

So one would suggest that education is indeed a strong reason for an NBN.

With a widespread & speedy NBN, we might even crack a mention on MIT OCW.


Cheers,
Stephen


> Frank O'Connor wrote:
> > At 9:06 AM +1100 10/1/11, Tom Worthington wrote:
> >> ... The technique I was introduced to is "Mentored and Collaborative
> >> e-Learning: 
> >> 
<http://www.ijcim.th.org/v15nSP4/P09SEARCC_ComputerProfessionalEducation.p
df>. 
> > 
> > Mmm .. That probably works fine for tertiary students .. but may have 
> > some problems when applied to the other 90% (Primary, secondary and 
> > other students not paying for, compulsorily required to do, and not 
> > inordinately motivated by, their education).    :) ...
> 
> In looking at the design of classrooms, I noticed a similarity between 
> what is now done with university students and the Montessori method for 
> self-directed learning for young children:
> <http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/01/book-on-designing-classrooms.html>.
> 
> The trick, as with the Montessori method, is to put the tools needed
> within reach of the students, so they have help when needed, without 
> feeling someone is telling them what to do.
> 
> > An inordinate amount of material already exists online, cheap digital 
> > encyclopedias  ...
> 
> Having spent much of the last few years sifting though the Wikipedia, 
> corporate, government and academic web sites looking for educational 
> content, I can say this is not easy. The effort in selecting suitable 
> material is expensive in terms of time. The Wikipedia, which has some 
> excellent information, but I find myself having to make numerous 
> corrections to it before it is usable.
> 
> > Surely some of the 40% of the ed budget that goes to the supposedly
> > productive bureaucrats 
> > could be used to source and amalgamate this content (by the 
> > bureaucracy). ...
> 
> No, to select material for teaching purposes you need people with some
> idea of the field and some expertise in the process of collecting
> information. The people most useful for this are librarians at 
> educational institutions, as that is what they are trained to do.
> 
> > Teachers could them pick and choose what they wanted to 
> > 'plug in' to their courseware for different purposes. ...
> 
> There are collections of information which teachers can use. These are
> called "textbooks", which are not cheap to produce because of the effort
> required.
> 
> > Access to libraries of content on their own servers accessible by a 
> > user friendly, content management I suppose you'd call it, front end 
> > isn't exactly rocket science ...
> 
> No, providing useful information is not "rocket science": it is a lot
> harder than that.
> 
> I attend meetings with scientists at CSIRO who can do a detailed 
> analysis of their specialist field, but can't explain it to a 
> non-expert. It is challenging to translate what they say to something 
> the general public (and students) can understand.
> 
> > LMS systems ... already flag poor performers is good, but how many 
primary or 
> > secondary teachers have access to this application or facility? ...
> 
> Moodle is free open source and so is widely used in schools and
> universities. Some state governments provide it centrally to schools, in
> other cases individual schools have their own LMS. As an example, here 
> are about a thousand references to Moodle in education in Australia: 
> <http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=moodle++school+%
22department+of+education%22+site%
3Agov.au&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=http://www.google.com/search?q=moodle++school+%
22department+of+education%22+site%3Agov.au>.

> Here are 4,500 references to Moodle in NSW Schools: 
> <http://www.google.com/search?q=moodle++site%3Aschools.nsw.edu.au>.
> 
> But the limitation is not so much with the LMS software but the 
training 
> the teachers then need in how to work the software and how to 
> incorporate it in their teaching.
> 
> Also what is lacking are incentives for providing generally useful 
> materials. Teachers are paid to teach their own students. There are no 
> bonuses for preparing material for use by others, which takes much more 
> work. If this could be done it would produce a better result for the 
> students and reduce costs overall.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
> PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
> Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
> Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
> Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link


Message sent using MelbPC WebMail Server