Friday, July 21, 2006

Still wondering about Wikis?

When you hear the word “Wiki” are you still a bit confused? In Hawaiian “wiki” means “quick” and if you need to know more than that there are a lot of good tutorials available on the web. A useful one that I recently came across, that is available in QuickTime video, can be found here. Meredith Farkas, Distance Learning Librarian, Norwich University, does a great job at explaining wikis in general as well as demonstrating several different applications. The archived presentation carries a “library” focus but don’t let that dissuade you, Meredith does a good job showing you some best practices in wiki usage and discusses software choices. Definitely worth a look if you haven’t used a wiki before. Mederith has also posted her slides in PDF format.

The largest application of a wiki is Wikipedia.org and if you are interested in that check out a previous posting I’ve made on the topic.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

iPod as a training aid in sports

A colleague of mine sat down in my cubicle this morning and told me about a recent story where Major League Baseball pitchers are using the iPod Video to review video of opposing batters from previous games. A quick search found this article online. Why am I posting a baseball story on this e-learning blog? Because it is clear to me that the iPod is being used as a training aid in the case of the baseball pitchers and those using it say they like it as well. As this quotation from the article demonstrates, the same reasons why iPods are useful in distance education drive the reasons why iPods are useful in this sports setting:

"They can do it on their time, they don't have to be here or they don't have to be behind a desk watching a laptop. They can be at home, on the airplane or even in their locker," Rockies video coach Mike Hamilton said.

We’ve often heard reports of the iPod having numerous applications as an educational tool in formal education settings and it’s nice to see this overlapping into other areas such as training aids. This portable iPod technology has potential for future developments that are very relevant to distance education. Stay tuned to what they think of next! In the meantime, instructors should practice their podcasting skills (*grin*).