Dr Sandy Britain
Ministry of Education (NZ)
Presentation

Dr Sandy Britain is a senior advisor to the Ministry of Education assisting with strategic development work around e-learning in NZ. Recently, Sandy has represented NZ interests in international work surrounding interoperability specifications and standards development and adoption. He has contributed to a number of eCDF projects in the last year and was a keynote speaker at e-Fest 2004. Prior to moving to New Zealand in 2004, Sandy worked closely with JISC and CETIS in the UK. He has published widely in the field of e-learning.

Modeling the content lifecycle using the e-Framework

Digital content plays a central role in the successful use of ICT in education and is key to the uptake of e-learning both in the schools and tertiary sectors. The Ministry of Education has been actively involved in providing both content for schools and tools for content discovery, storage and retrieval through, for example, the TKI initiative. However as yet there has been no attempt to make provision at a national level for the entire content life-cycle from authoring through to use (and re-use) using international standards for packaging and transfer of content. 

The e-Framework (www.e-framework.org) provides a tool for modelling service-oriented architectures for the entire content life-cycle using Service Usage Models (SUMS). A content-life-cycle SUM is already available produced by ADL.

This paper describes a project to use the ADL content lifecycle SUM as a foundation to develop a model which can be applied to the NZ education context. The benefits and issues associated with using an e-framework approach based on SUMS for this project will be discussed.

Helen Otto, Melanie Brown
Wintec (NZ)
Presentation

Helen is an Instructional Designer at Wintec and is an experienced teacher, manager and teacher trainer with past experience working in the health sector. She holds a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics from Waikato University. She is a content writer, curriculum and course designer, developing online courses for test preparation, ESP(English for Specific Purposes)and teacher training.

Melanie is an Instructional Designer at Wintec. She holds a Master of Arts with honours, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Second Language Teaching with distinction from Waikato University. She has worked on projects internationally for general English, business English, hospitality, business, foundation study skills and beauty and spa therapy.

Instructional design, connects, collaborates and conquers

This presentation focuses on the process of making connections between individuals employed in educational and service-related organizations in order to produce online learning courseware. Determining the nature of the courses required consideration of the needs of potential students, commercial partners, academic regulatory bodies, as well as financial and technical constraints.The presentation describes how these issues were managed in the development of the courses from the initial planning stages through to their release.

Both the hospitality and health sectors are two communities which employ significant numbers of NESB health and hospitality professionals, requiring flexible learning opportunities to develop greater proficiency in conversational English, within their respective workplaces. During the initial stage of the presentation, attendees will be divided into small discussion groups and provided with some of the 'challenges' facing the learning designers involved in these projects. Following the discussion there will be a detailed explanation of how the instructional designers and organizations worked collaboratively to meet their individual goals. The presentation will end with a short demonstration of some aspects of the courseware developed.

Dr Satoru Fujii (facilitated by Sarah-Jane Saravani)
Matsue National College of Technology (Japan)
Presentation

Professor Fujii worked from 1969 to 1993 in Panasonic Co., Ltd. He researched about media information processing in Institute of Tokyo Panasonic, and created about fifty patents. Professor Fujii transferred to Matsue College of Technology as an associate professor in 1994 and was promoted as a professor in 1998. He is now Director, Media Education Center. He received Professional Engineer(PE) in 1990 and Ph.D in 2005. His research interests include e-Learning, mobile learning systems and three-dimensional graphics.

Development and Evaluation of Unbiquitous Learning Support Systems Using Three-Dimentional Graphics

Matsue National College of Technology, Japan, has recognised the limitations of e-learning events designed in two dimensions and delivered through cable-connected computers. The Department of Information Engineering has developed a number of e-learning systems, wireless terminals and three dimensional graphics.

This interactive presentation will demonstrate and explain four e-learning events designed by Matsue National College of Technology.

• Ecology learning system with three-dimensional graphics and local materials database: This system is focused on Lake Shinji and simulates the water clarity of the lake.
• Ubiquitous Historical Tour Support System: This system uses GPS, 3D graphics and multilingual information to guide tourists through a Matsue historic site.
• Exercise Lesson Support System using Personal Digital Assistant: This system allows students and teachers to interact during normal classroom sessions.
• Three-dimensional Virtual School constructed with several Learning Support Systems: In this 3D environment participants can access a virtual school building and engage in e-learning activities in English, Mathematics, Typewriting and Information Technology.

Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier
Edtechtalk.com (US)
Presentation, remote

Jeff is an educator, webcaster, and community developer who spends much of his time experimenting with new media and building collaborative communities. As the founder and general manager of Worldbridges, he is involved in managing dozens of  of websites including edtechtalk.com, webcastacademy.net , educationbridges.org, eflbridges.net,  webheadsinaction.org, and pusanweb.com.  Many of these sites are directly related to education and all of them use the latest networking  tools to help people connect, learn, & collaborate.

Jeff has taught elementary school in New Mexico and university level ESL in Thailand & Korea. He currently teaches CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) at Southern New Hampshire University, although most of his 'educational activities' these days take place within the online world of 'open source learning'.  He regularly neglects his blog at http://jefflebow.net/, but is a prolific producer of  webcasts, podcasts, & screencasts on the Worldbridges.net network of sites.

Dave Cormier is a web technologies specialist at the University of Prince Edward Island, cofounder of Edtechtalk, and president of Edactive Technologies, a social software consulting firm. He holds a master's degree in education from Mount St. Vincent University and teaches sporadically on a variety of educational topics. His major research interests include the tracking and development of educational technology, the examination of planned and unplanned online communities, and open-source multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs).

Dave is a member of the Joint Information Systems Committee Emerge Project in the United Kingdom and has designed and written a variety of grants and projects, including the recently completed Canadian Heritage-funded Living Archives project. He has produced, designed, or participated in over 300 online webcasts in the past three years and speaks regularly at conferences on topics including rhizomatics, effective use of new technologies, and educational project management and design.

Informal professional development networks - the Edtechtalk.com experience

EdTechTalk started as a conversation between Dave & Jeff and has grown into a community of practice that uses live, interactive webcasting and other social technologies to support informal professional development and global collaboration.  In this presentation, they will provide a short overview of how the community functions and evolves. Then, in the EdTechTalk spirit of 'just try it', they will use their latest mashup of tools to stream an actual ETT webcast aimed at connecting conference participants with remote EdTechTalkers and demonstrating the power of personal learning networks that develop as a result of this kind of online interaction.

Stephen Harlow and Julie Starr
Wintec (NZ)
Presentation

Stephen is a jack of all trades, master of none. Despite training as a chemist he is currently employed at the Waikato Institute of Technology as an e-learning developer, librarian and journalism tutor. A 2004 Flexible Learning Leader Stephen is passionate about learning and refuses to be put in a box.

Julie is enjoying life back in her native NZ after 10 years living overseas. A journalist by trade, she has worked in radio and print as a presenter, reporter, sub-editor and editorial manager. She was a chief change agent and workflow queen for Telegraph Media Group's integrated multimedia newsroom in the UK. Now she consults to newspapers on digital projects, is Editor-in-Residence at Wintec's School of Media Arts in Hamilton, and teaches on the AUT University journalism programme.

What lies beyond the walls? Connecting through web 2.0

Dan Gillmor is well known for challenging fellow journalists to shift from lecture mode to a conversational mode. While journalists struggle to meet Gillmor's challenge, we the educators are looking at making a similar shift in our practice. So, when we were asked to teach a course on web media for aspiring journalism and PR students it seemed appropriate to accept Gillmor's challenge.

This session will look at the way in which we have taken the discussion outside of the LMS by encouraging students to use their weblogs to participate in a distributed conversation about content that is largely student generated or drawn from that available on the internet.

As Clay Shirky asserts, web 2.0 lowers the cost of experimentation and experiment we have: students use web 2.0 tools to recommend their own readings prompting responses on their weblogs; instructional video is drawn from video sharing sites; and photographs are uploaded to Flickr where a visiting expert adds feedback. RSS is the glue that connects all of these pieces together before passing them through the walls of the LMS, but increasingly we find ourselves asking "why?" when students' aggregators or personalised start pages might serve more authentically as personal learning environments.