July 8, 2009
In the last few weeks, I've been reading a number of articles, many of which I found through eLearnMag.org's Twitter network, about elearning, education, and trends in learning technologies.
Sometimes, the materials I found fit neatly within the topic of elearning, like Abhijit Kadle's list format blog post on Upside Learning, "Top 100 Learning Game Resources."
Other times, technology and interactivity isn't even close to the focus of the article I’m reading, but the topic is foundational to my understanding of e-learning in some other way. For example, I spent some time yesterday morning reading the Wikipedia entry about the Bologna Process, after editor-in-chief Lisa Neal Gualtieri returned from a conference in Croatia and explained that those two words were uttered almost as often as bonjour and ciao among her European colleagues. As far as I can tell, the Bologna Process basically has to do with standardizing certification for higher education across Europe. But how does technology fit into the equation? I'm still asking more questions about it and would be grateful if any of our European readers might chime in with some comments, thoughts, and opinions!
And right under my very nose, as I was preparing Curtis J. Bonk's article in defense of open source projects for publication last week, I realized how often I rely on (and perhaps take for granted after nearly 10 years of use) very simple online education resources like Purdue University's OWL project, my go-to site for quickly checking how to format pieces of writing to all the various standardizations. It was through reading Bonk's article that I felt a renewed appreciation for sources such as these, or Google Scholar, another invaluable tool that has revolutionized the way I fact check citations before publishing them. —Jill Duffy