My work today!

I am enjoying what I am doing so I thought I would include it here:

I have been working on the Real Skills Virtually project (see links in side bar). I have updated the Real Skills Virtually blog and developed the Preparatory Phase project plan in the Immersive Environment wiki. Now, I am going to whip up a storm via email with the six teachers that are interested in participating - and off into teaching and learning in an immersive virtual environment we will go. The project team I am working with is great, we are all considered but positive and enthusiastic in our approach!

My other job today will be to draft a project proposal for funding that I initially worked on with Alex Hayes, and recently with Grant Casey and Paul Wray. There is an interesting balance in developing project proposals for external funding, because while I may want to venture into new territory there is a need to expand on comfortable and proven concepts - small rotations of the existing wheel, rather than trying out completely different wheels. Anyway, between all of us, and in conjunction with Alex Hayes concept of pushing out audio and video interactions with Trades people (TradeCast) - we have come up with the idea of the TradeFeed project.

Briefly TradeFeed will use RSS to capture and distribute information about trade training pushed out and will feed in learner generated material related to their study and assessment. The push out will be RSS from various sources, including TradeCast by Alex Hayes, then subscribed to and distributed by RSS in a personal learning environment like IGoogle or protopage etc.

Learner generated material will be posted to a scrapbooking site like Tumblr, which is also mobile enabled. Tumblr generates RSS of the learner generated material, and the teacher and other learners can subscribe to this.

So in this project we are combining a number of technologies that have been tried and tested in previous educational projects and applying them coherently to training in the trades skills shortage areas.

Summary - TradeFeed includes:

Podcasting and Vodcasting for distribution of educational material
RSS subscriptions and distribution of resources and learner generated material
Personal Learning Environments for managing own learning
Blogging, videoblogging and moblogging for learning and assessment

I will get some feedback from the others and then I will write it up!