Overviews of e-learning research papers

For those of you who'd love to read more research papers on e-learning but don't know where to look, this website seems like it will be very useful:

http://www.elearning-reviews.org/

It's run jointly between Stanford University and a centre in Switzerland, and compiles brief reviews of research papers related to e-learning. I've only just discovered it - the site is a bit ugly but the content looks really useful.

Julie's Introduction

Hello, I'm Julie Voce and I'm one of two Learning Technologies Support Officers. My role is to provide support, advice and training on all aspects of Learning Technology. The main area I deal with is the Virtual Learning Environment, WebCT, however this will probably change as people embrace other technologies like Computer Assisted/Aided Assessment.

To let you know a little more about my background, I have a MEng in Computer Science so in theory I'm quite techy with experience of programming in C, Java and obscure languages like Haskell and Modula-2. My first job after graduating was at UMIST (now part of the University of Manchester) on an EU funded research project which developed a piece of language learning software for intermediate to advanced learners of French (Freetext). Whilst at UMIST I also taught on the MSc in Computer Assisted Language Learning, where our students had to develop a WebCT course and I am pleased to say they did remarkably well.

For more information about learning technology see: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/learningtechnology/

Let's not go there

In Derek Morrison's Auricle, a frightening 2nd-hand account of rampant corporatisation - use the Official VLE or get a slap. Derek:

Message from Earth to institution; weblogs, wikis etc - you need to support them.

The First Party was James Farmer - article here - note the many, many messages of outrage and support.

The paradox is, I suppose, that teachers require support and infrastructure to deliver their teaching. What they don't want is for the provision, when it comes, to completely dictate their teaching practices. If we can't have provision then we'll require to be left alone to work. That's natural enough when we are talking about £200 OHP units but not necesserly the outcome when the technology costs are orders of magnitude greater.

Creativity is not an optional extra in the education field. I sincerely hope our institution doesn't go this way (towards a proprietary monoculture of tools), and, to date it doesn't look like it will. An example of second-mover advantage, perhaps?