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Sanjaya Mishra (received July 2010) Associate Professor (Distance Education), Staff Training and Research Institute of Distance Education, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi, India sanjayamishra@hotmail.com
The book has ten significant chapters, as well as one at the start giving an overview, and one at the end with summary and conclusions. Each of the chapters ends with a biographical sketch of a significant contributor to the growth and development of theory and practice of distance education. The ten main chapters also define key terms and provide questions for review and reflection. It is because of these questions that the book can be very well used as a textbook to initiate discussion on various aspects of distance education at postgraduate level.
Rarely do we come across an edited book that some of the best minds in the discipline contribute to, and at the same time that provides opportunity for reflection, review and discussion going beyond a textbook approach. This book falls into this rare group and has the potential to become a classic in its field. While it gives us a historical perspective of distance education, it also directs us towards the challenges of change it is facing – from the “industrial education approach” capable of major economies of scale to the “information education approach” that brings distance education new organisational and pedagogic models.
Increasingly, teachers have appreciated the potential of technology in teaching and learning, yet the implementation of technology in the classroom settings moved slowly. (National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), 2006). Apart from external factors such as budget and technical problems, slow movement may result from intellectually superficial teacher training which is unable to provide ongoing support for teachers as they attempt to implement new pedagogies such as the integration of educational technologies into teaching practices (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). Further, researchers have found that professional development in technology integration are often short of providing such context that supports teachers to develop multiple kinds of knowledge and appropriate skills in order to create their own technology-based instruction (Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2000; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wiggins, 1993). Despite the plethora of rhetoric about teacher professional development in technology integration, there is still a paucity of empirical data addressing the effective implementation of online professional development to promote the actual implementation of technology into classroom, or about its impact on teaching practices. Supporting in-service teachers
The learning process can be transformed from in-class teaching into learning outside the classroom due to the emergence of new networking tools. In this study, peer feedback was used to enhance elementary students’ writing through employing a brand new networking environment: the blogWeb 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005).Without teachers’ guidance on the out-of-class writing, students were brought to the blog environment in which they posted their articles, made corrections or gave suggestions and shared their work with others. Thus, students could have greater inspiration to write and gain more practice in writing.
The present study represented a preliminary effort to empirically examine the efficacy of subtitled movie on listening comprehension of intermediate English as a Foreign Language students. To achieve this purpose, out of a total of 200 intermediate students, 90were picked based on a proficiency test. The material consisted of six episodes (approximately 5 minutes each) of a DVD entitled ‘Wild Weather’. The students viewed only one of the three treatment conditions: English subtitles, Persian subtitles, no subtitles. After each viewing session, six sets of multiple-choice testswere administered to examine listening comprehension rates. The results revealed that the English subtitles group performed at a considerably higher level than the Persian subtitles group, which in turn performed at a substantially higher level than the no subtitle group on the listening test.
Virtual character is a significant application in the research field of technology-enhanced learning. In this study, the concept of animal companions, ‘non-smart’ virtual characters, is proposed as a way to encourage students to promote effort-making learning behaviours. The two underpinning design rationales are first discussed followed by the description of the development of a practical application, the My-Pet v2 system. A preliminary experiment was conducted to examine the system usability in terms of cognitive, affective and time-on-task characteristics. The results reveal that participants in the group using a complete version of My-Pet v2 showed better quality of effort-making learning behaviours. Some implications and future research directions are also discussed.
The conceptions an individual holds about a phenomenon can influence and determine associated behaviours and perspectives. Consequently, they have a bearing upon how learning about a phenomenon is undertaken and how that phenomenon is experienced and applied in context. A phenomenographic research approach was used to gather the expressed experiences of e-learning and professional development for e-learning held by teachers and support staff from institutions across New Zealand. Five conceptions of e-learning (as tool and equipment; as a facilitator of interaction; as learning; as a reduction in distance; and as a collaborative enterprise) and four conceptions of professional development for e-learning (as training; as opening up possibilities; as collaboration; and as relevant and purposeful) were discovered. In this report, we discuss the conceptions, and show how they are interrelated through outcome space. Implications for the professional development of tertiary teachers and teaching support staff are outlined. The study provides some insights for individuals, institutions and those responsible for planning and implementing professional development programmes to help them to support the development and progress of e-learning in appropriate and rewarding directions.
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