Kestrel Blackmore

I’ve been at e-Dayz09 for the last two days.  It is a two day conference on e-learning held in Adelaide, Australia.  The conference has been running since 2001 and in it’s current two day format since 2005.  Here is the official event description:

E-Dayz is a two-day e-learning conference which will showcase innovative and leading edge e-learning approaches from across the entire South Australian Vocational Education (VET) community, and beyond.

I found the following presenters topics particularly interesting.

Cathy Moore

Cathy Moore was one of the keynote speakers and gave excellent advice on how best to engage your learners.  Her whole philosophy is creating activities that show the learner what they need to do rather than just what they need to know.  Here are some other great points Cathy made:

• Have characters face a challenge
• Show, don’t tell
• Give learners a reason to care about the activity
• Give learners opportunities to practice/fail in a safe environment
• Chop irrelevant information

Cathy has a whole blog where she goes into great deal at Elearning Blueprint.  You should definitely check it out!  Cathy’s sessions were the highlight of the conference for me as they contained really good, practical advice on how to design an e-learning course.

Mark Drechsler

Mark gave us a couple of tricks we can do in Moodle so that courses don’t end up being one page with hundreds of links but rather have some basic hierarchical structure to it.  Check out his presentation titled Unmoodling your moodle at slideshare.net

Julian Ridden

Julian, or as he calls himself moodleman, gave us a sneak peak at Moodle 2 which looks very interesting.  The first thing I noticed is that they have vastly improved the look and feel which is good because Moodle tends to be a bit ugly.  Some things of interest:

• Repositories.  Access files/objects from any course not just your course.  Also access files/objects/images/video directly from Youtube, Flickr (to name a few) without the need to upload into your course.
• E-portfolios.  You can take an interaction or content from Moodle and send it to your external E-portfolio so that you can keep a portfolio of all learning interactions you have been involved in.
• Conditional activities.  You can now do branching and only show certain parts of content when certain conditions are met.

David Peterson

David gave us an update on the different things the Women’s and Children’s Hospital is doing in the area of e-learning.  Of particular interest is the BloodSafe e-learning program that they developed for the Australian Government.  He also demonstrated several other e-learning courses they have developed which have used extensive story telling and video to create a truly engaging and immersive learning environment.

Rhys Moult

Rhys took a hands on workshop and showed us a several tools that can be used to create mashups of information.  Wix is particularly interesting.  It’s a full WYSIWYG editor for creating flash websites!

• Wix.  Design flash websites in minutes
• Prezi.  An innovative way of creating astonishing presentations
• Sprout Builder.  Create branded rich-media content and widgets

Summary

Had a great time and am looking forward to applying the information to my e-learning courses.