$ 5.8 million up for grabs

More than $5.8 million is being made available in 2007 for E-learning projects from the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. By far the largest amount is going to to the training of teachers (2.8 million). For more details check the website. AFLF

The big picture

Sometimes it is valuable to think beyond the commonplace and the familiar and come to grips with some of the broader issues behind phenomena like Web 2. An article on RoughType discusses the ownership issues around Web 2 in a way that is overdue in the vocational education community. Original link courtesy of new master media

Best free web 2 applications

Here is a short list of web 2 apps that I like including free office suites and file conversion.
online office suites
ajax13
think free
zoho presenter
collaboration
thinkature
dimdim
photo editing
fauxto
pikipimp
video
bubbleply
flixin
democracy
pixpo
jumpcut(online editor)
blogs
edublogs
pbwiki
file conversion
zamzar

More google mashups

Chicago crime
Bicycle trails
Secret fishing holes

Organisational climate and e-learning

I once wrote a paper on the connection between organisational climate and service quality in hotels. Obviously this has a lot of relevance to the hospitality industry. To me, at the time it was an important connection to make: the way a manager or supervisor behaved influenced the atmosphere that staff were subsequently asked to work in to such an extent that outcomes for customers and stakeholders were ultimately affected. If a manager was condescending or neurotic it was the shareholders or clients who suffered the most. But the problem was, that organisational climate itself was notoriously difficult to define. This was highlighted when one writer claimed that if researchers continued to use the same terms to mean different things climate research would “grind to a halt in an assemblage of walled in hermits each mumbling to himself in a private language that only he can understand” I think that many e-learning and change management initiatives in the vocational education sector face a similar paradox. There is so much to be gained from implementing e-learning intiatives, but, a fundamental disconnect exists between the needs of the practitioners expected to implement the concepts and incorporate them into their everyday practice and the proponents of change especially if they are not involved in day to day educational practice. Borrowing again from service management theory an essential component of long term survival is seeking out and addressing the needs of the customer, in this case the teaching cohort not in perpetuating a private language amongst the initiated. Teachers dont care if it is web 2, javascript, ajax, ruby on rails, shockwave, or rss they simply want solutions to everyday problems that are easy to manage and use in the long term. You can use just about any platform to do this as long as you make sure that what you do do is recyclible into the future. The promise of web 2 is seductive but usability is still the key to utilisation.