Ohmigosh - Google Books blows my socks off

I'm actually quite speechless. Google books. It's amazing. Try searching for anything - anything - and you will find that it has performed text searches of individual works and links to previews.

Wow.

Promising veins of peer reviewed information

At first I wondered whether there was a literature for Christian education and e-learning; I am discovering that, as with most other fields, there is - and that it is particularly useful. Work by Steve Delamarter (George Fox Evangelical Seminary) in Teaching theology and religion (article available here for free) and a recent issue in the Religious Studies Review focussing on "Religion online" show that there is a lot of very interesting activity taking place in this area.

I am discovering the benefits of online journal subscriptions - something I just took for granted at Massey. For the moment I am very limited in what I can access, and there are frustrating holes in the online searches I am able to perform. I guess I finally need to enrol... I am making
inquiries at the moment.

Ten myths about distance learning

This from the US Distance Learning Association's recent USA Today insert (PDF)... ten myths about distance learning:

1. Classroom learning is superior to distance learning.
2. Distance learning lacks important interaction with faculty and other students.
3. Distance learning works well for some subjects/degrees but not for others.
4. Distance learning works well only for certain types of students.
5. Employers don’t value online degrees or courses as highly as classroom instruction.
6. It is difficult to measure learning at a distance, because you can’t be sure how much time people are spending or who is really doing the work.
7. Distance learning is a quick and easy way to get a degree.
8. Online learning diminishes the teacher’s importance.
9. Distance learning is less expensive to provide than traditional education.
10. Distance learning will make traditional classroom – based education obsolete.

Touche. I particularly like #7; let's not mistake convenience for simplicity!

Sloan-C View - Online Courses Lead the Way in Quality Assurance

Not yet subscribing to Sloan-C (the Sloan Consortium)? Do so! This little pearl from the latest version that arrived in my inbox this morning, written by Ron Legon, Executive Director, The Quality Matters Program :

Paradoxically, while the rapid growth of online education has generated quality concerns, online instruction has actually advanced the art of quality assurance in higher education...

This is because online education makes it so much easier to investigate the actual operation of the course itself, rather than measuring inputs (faculty credentials, library resources, etc.) and outcomes. As Legon says,

The electronic record of an online course lays out the entire instructional strategy and learning process of the course as it unfolds, lesson by lesson and week by week.

Legon's own online quality rubric can be used for the purposes of evaluation, and is worth a look alongside the New Zealand e-learning guidelines.

Best Web 2.0 software of 2006

Many thanks to Derek W who has drawn attention to a list by Dion Hinchcliffe. It is difficult to keep up to speed with Web 2.0 applications, and I admit to some frustration in making a commitment to a particular service only to find it later superceded (such is the case for me with PageFlakes at the moment - I see that, for Dion at least, "Netvibes" comes first in the 'Start Pages' category).

I celebrate the diversity and innovation, but part of me is looking forward to some sort of Web 2.0 'shake-up'. I have some unease about making a personal investment in services that could eventually become either out of date, fall so far behind what is possible that add-ons become clumsy, or where the service becomes less comprehensive than others (the reason for me moving from Bloglines to PageFlakes).

Bring on the Web 2.0 killer-app... but then again, that's not a very Web 2.0 thing to wish for, is it? PageFlakes is working wonderfully for me for now, but my loyalty is only as deep as the investment I have made in setting up my Flakes. If something new and whizzy comes along that is easy to set up (and PageFlakes itself was wonderfully simple), I confess that my shallow and fickle Web 2.0 consumerism would see me migrate!