Lying for Learning

I read an interesting blog post the other day, about Lying for Learning. The storey is that there was a professor who on the first day of classes told his students that in every lecture, he will plant a falsehood. There job was to find it, correct it and report back on it in the next class.

At first the falsehoods were easy to spot. Sometimes the students were even able to correct it and report it before the end of class, but as the year went on, it got harder to spot, and so the students started to form groups to identify and then correct the falsehood. This got the students to start questioning everything the prof had said and discussing and validating everything from the class.

What a brilliant idea! He challenged them, and as a result they ended up reviewing and analysing everything he had said. Which I am sure lead to a deeper understanding and knowledge of the course material.

Finally towards the end of the course, the students had a lecture in which they could not not find the falsehood. When they finally admitted it in class, the Prof admitted that in the last lecture there had been no falsehoods. Some of the students pointed out that he had said in the very first class, that there would be a falsehood in every class. His response:

I lied.

Beautiful!!! Now how can I use this in one of my courses?

Colorschemer

Recently on the Rapid Elearning Blog, Tom wrote about 9 free tools that help him build better elearning courses and i wanted to single one out for this blog post.

ColorSchemer
By selecting a colour and entering its RGB or Hex number, Colorschemer will provide you with a palette of colours you can use in the design of your elearning course.

By creating a palette of colours you can add a greater sense of connectedness to your course, especially if you base your palette off over a logo or other predominate object in the course. Also having a unique and related colour palette will help your course, I believe in achieving a more professional and polished look.

(The colour scheme for our college's green)

Pocket Mods

This is a pretty cool piece of Flash work. I always enjoy finding creative sites like this. http://pocketmod.com/v2/ allows you, using a single piece of paper to create an 8 page mini booklet with what ever content you wold like.

I have seen this site spoken about before, generally for the creation of schedules for conferences, but have not gone and looked at the site in some time. Now however, there is so much more that can be done... storyboards, grids, etc. This would be neat to include in our multiday courses or as a take away "crib" notes from a course. Very cool stuff indeed!

Photo Web Site

Almost everyone who works with me knows of my intense dislike of clipart. (I should clarify, it is the "standard" clipart I dislike, and how it is generally used in course and other learning materials). So I am always on the look out for good photo sites. I recently came across this site: http://everystockphoto.com/ and am really enjoying it. It links to free photos (doubel check the lisence agreements just in case) and searchs several sites including Flickr.

RSS Feeds

I often get asked how I come up with great ideas, or where did I find that cool site that does that cool thing. Honestly, I read.

Kinda scary when you think about it. I spend probably close to an hour a day, wither at work, on the bus or at home reading blogs or email newletters (for lack of a better term) on the topics of elearning, learning, mobile learning, presentations, design and creativity. And that hour is sometimes not nearly long enough. I also spend a lot of time thinking... exploring what something would look like in my mind's eye.

To help me do this, I use a RSS reader. Simply put, an RSS reader goes to all the websites I have subscribed to and brings their latest offerings to one location on the web. No more going from site to site to see what's new. I have used two RSS readers in the past and would recommend either one of them. Bloglines and Netvibes. Both are really good at what they do, but a slightly different tools. But that's a topic for another post.

Presentation Zen

I am reading Presentation Zen right now. Great book so far, and it comes highly recommended by the blogging / elearning / learning world. While I don't create alot of "business presentations" I do create a lot of elarning and presentations for the classroom, and I think they are essentially the same thing. I have to communicate (sell) a knowledge skill or attitude (or idea). So the prinicipals hold true. I really like the questions he is possing so far. Some great ones that I can see using here at work.

What your (the) point?
Why does it matter?

Is it useful and necessary? or just interesting and cool?

Can I explain (sell) the message / idea in 30 secs?

oh some food for thought for sure...

This is a different way of thinking, especially for me , working here in the government, where everything seems to be drawn out in great detail. So, to help me practice, the blog will now live by those rules.

Whats the point, why does it matter, and it should take you no longer than about 30 seconds to read the post... lets see how it goes...

Del.ici.ous

Ahhhh one of my favorite web 2.0 tools. Social bookmarking. Have to say, I could be using it a bit better, but its working for me. So, what is social bookmarking? I'll explain briefly...

1. Its a "Bookmark Favorites" but is kept on-line and not just in your browser. Thus, you can access it where ever you are, you just need an Internet connection.


2. You can do more than just save your bookmarks. You can tag and annotate them.


3. Best part... you can share them with friends and colleagues.

My tool of choose is Del.ici.ous. You can see my bookmarks here, a big mix of work related and personal stuff.