Benefits of An Online Discussion List in A Traditional Distance Education Course
The authors describe the use of online discussion in a nursing course at Central Queensland University and conclude that the exercise demonstrated "success in fostering an environment where students could develop higher order thinking." This they attribute to "ensuring the elements of a constructivist model of learning were incorporated in the design and use of the discussion list." This conclusion does not follow from the study, since they do not set up and test similar discussion list where constructivist principles were not employed; it may be possible that a discussion list promotes higher order thinking with or without constructivist elements. More...

From a Distance: Student Empowerment and Constructing Teacher Identities Online
This is pretty neat. "Teachers' identities are intertwined with various contexts and collaborative partnerships they encounter as practitioners." Consequently, "they are constantly challenged to unpack how this configures within a broader scheme of things." Personal identity is a fluid concept in an online world - I have many! - and, as the authors note, a fundamental element of communities of practice. More...

E-Learning For Short Attention Spans
I've hit this point before but it's nice to see a reasonably comprehensive article - with a good case study from Dow Chemical - argue in favour of short e-learning units, especially for corporate learning - rtaher than the traditional course. More...

Hong Kong to Build E-learning Society: Official
Short article containing the statement and some statistics on computer use in Hong Kong schools. More...

Librarians do E-Learning Metadata! A Report on the NSDL Vocabulary Workshop
Norm Friesen - who, I'm happy to say, remains at Athabasca University - passes along this conference summary from the recent NSDL Vocabulary Workshop. More...

Mobile E-learning, Policy development and ICT Teacher Training in Cambodia
Page pointing to three links related to this project. The most significant is the first link, which is a report on this project from the end of May, describing updates in Cambodian ICT policy, an e-learning bus touring the country, e-learning teacher training, and more. More...

Cognitive and Logical Rationales for e-Learning Objects
I didn't particularly enjoy this paper - it was hard to follow, didn't really advance anything new, and where it did seem to be new and clear, seemed wrong. But it's being discussed by the IT Forum right now (and generated some dicussion last month on another forum) so I'm passing it along. More...

E-Learning Industry Promotion and Development
Jean sent me this useful link which will be of interest to those wanting to know about e-learning in Taiwan. More...

Learning From Disappointment: When Learning Solutions Fail to Deliver
A lot of e-learning disappoints, and it makes sense, as the author suggests, to learn from our mistakes (that's why I've learned so much). But to learn from a mistake, you have to correctly identify the cause of the problem. Is this list it? I'm not so sure. More...

A Model for Sustainable Student Retention
The drop-out rate for online learning, note the authors, is steadily about ten or twenty percent higher than for traditional learning. It may be tempting to seek a simple explanation for this, but as they note, there is no simple explanation for drop-out rates in general. More...