The Dance of the E-Learning Objects

It's all coming together like a great musical that many people have been rehearsing for weeks: some playing instruments, some singing or acting, some building sets.

Thanks Vlad B at flickr

Everyone thinking 'how the hell can we combine all the different strands to create a thing of such beauty and complexity as this?'

For most of this year, I cursed the imac for not doing what I was used to. But I'll postpone a situation analysis on the imac for a later entry.

The e-mentor project presented challenges to 'talk the walk' amongst the e-leaders and travellers. But what is the walk? What's the best way to use a bunch of Web2 tools with our students in an environment where access to the internet is never assured, where you never know from one day to the next if the necesssary plug-ins /add-ons are available to run audio and video. And the students' computer literacy is inconsistent and patchy.

Last year (or was in 2008?) I set up the CNLCTalks wiki to be shared by ESL and ALBE classes to both showcase students' oracy work and as an internet hub for learning resources. I drew inspiration mainly from Dale Pobega's blog and Rosa's podcasts st St George TAFE in Sydney.

We had some early modest success, mainly in uploading audios from the Communications 3 group, and storing audio/ video / screencasts for ESL classes and computer classes. We also put a pdf of the latest students' RAW Newsletter there, though I doubt if anyone actually accesses it in this way. But I really felt that the wiki is under-utilised by both students and staff. Even I have had ups and downs with collecting student-centred content and with sourcing and uploading resources.

However recently a few things have fallen nicely into place. And we're pretty close to running a dress rehearsal (returning to the opening analogy).

The adoption and integration of digital audio is a rough road to travel: operating mp3 players, file management, editing (simply) in Audacity have all presented challenges. Even now we continue to do battle with the Voice recorder in Voxopop and are considering the move to a Pro Easi-speak microphone to ease the transition (for teachers especially).

However, I'm convinced the discovery of ipadio and phone blogging is a breakthrough for generating teacher-produced podcasts and recording students both in and beyond the classroom.

And the other day I finally incorporated Dropbox so that my Netbook and imac finally share files - like a separated couple who begrudgingly communicate now via a mediator! So now I don't need to take the mp3 player home to copy files to the Netbook. And the extra memory stick I recently bought can be mothballed. With 3 copies of a particular file (doc/ mp3) in 3 different places, I can update in any of these places and know that it is quietly working in the background to update the other copies too. Wow - an app that actually works for me (not the other way around!)

It's time to revisit the question: where are we heading and with what resources and tools? And we're in a good place to re-position ourselves, our tools and resources for the future.