ELearn 2005 - Tuesday Morning

The first session that I went to was on online professional development. What they found in their study was what many already know – teachers don’t have enough time while learning and enough support after learning to implement anything that they may have gained from professional development seminars. They found no difference between many factors including age and experience in terms of how much of the PD was implemented, though they did find that those with more training and with better attitudes coming into the PD session tended to implement more in their practice and even if it was not the actual product produced in the PD session, the ideas carried over. The next session was about disaster recovery – a small turn out for this one – had some good points. Store things in redundant ways if there is anything of value. And off site, as far off site as possible. Treat educational IT as it were a business – because it is. After that session I got caught up in the hall with a friend and a new person talking about blogging at the conference and a sneaky suspicion on her part that the US election in 2004 really put the heat under people to look at blogs. The other conversation revolved around learning in emergencies – and how there are so many organizations out there that try to bring physical classrooms back in. They don’t need these in a crisis – they don’t need computers, they need play and oral techniques – informal learning and situated so that it will help them asap. The last session of the morning was about blogging (I got in late for the culture and EGallery sessions because of hall talk). They found in their research that blogging did indeed help to create a community for people and provided them with an outlet to help them share and vindicate ideas. They also found that there is still a need for some formalized ethics around “professionals who blog” – I would think these are common sense – and that many bloggers were younger and that they used blogs in the same manner that they had used reflective journals in their preservice – with the benefit of a larger and hopefully collaborative audience. Technorati Tags: ELearn 2005, blogging, Professional Development,Crisis/Emergency Education