Wednesday, March 13, 2013

First Post

why you’re studying this course:  Want a better understanding of open on-line learning and how it might be leveraged in the museum environment.

what your background is: Medical Illustrator, Museum Educator  and Collection Manager for the Human Developmental Anatomy Center at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

I was a part of several early (10 years ago) experimental on-line learning projects teaching embryology to high school students.  Most recently I was part of the Digital Cultures and E-Learning Mooc that just finished and it was a fascinating experience.  While I'm pretty technically savvy I don't bother with social media much as it takes too much time from hands on things that, quite frankly, I'd rather be doing.  But I do see the value in it and I'd like to explore the possibilities and the balance between the real and virtual museum education environments.

 Linked-In had a great conversation on http://www.contactnorth.ca/trends-directions/evolving-pedagogy/5-ways-online-learning-enabling-change-post-secondary-education.  My artifact sort of stems from that.

It's pretty simplistic, just a Google Trends analysis of a few words related to open learning.  I was a bit surprised about the results actually.  I hadn't expected to see such a long decline in searches related to E-Learning.  Perhaps it was because the ability to deliver had not caught up with the idea of it.  To me, big jump in the last two years is showing that even though there was a long delay from conception to implementation people were waiting.  I guess advent of a set of portals, tools and probably reasonably high speed connections that make on-line learning possible for the average person.






2 comments:

  1. Hi Liz - neat, I like playing with google trends. You're right, that decline in elearning is surprising. I wonder, did it include only "e-learning" or "elearning" also - maybe people have dropped the hypen over the years? Or is it revealing more than a semantic shift and the term is less meaningful because it has become part of the mainstream?
    Martin

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  2. Hadn't thought of it that way. It's probably combination of all of that. It might be interesting to try and track the change in language and see if it reflects a real change in tech or a change in how "e-learning" is percieved.

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