eLearning – Concept for a Seminar

I am giving my first Seminar at the University of Hamburg this Semester. It is a lot of fun working with interested and motivated students and it is a lot of work to arrange a seminar for those students.
I decided not to use one of the established plattform which are supposed to support seminars here in Hamburg.

Reasons to work with a Blog and Wiki in Seminars

I decided that i’d like to try to work with a weblog-wiki-combination for my seminar as I am always praying telling in my workshops.

1. While I am pretty familar with Blogs and Wikis I thought the students should get in touch with Blog and Wikis more than just comment and read stuff I wrote.
   One reason for that was that I’d like to read a little bit more about their thoughts about the seminar, eLearning and related stuff.
2. Another reason to let the students have their own blog was that I want them to be able to get their content to the web, more or less periodically. To write a Blog is a very easy way to publish information on the net.
3. The main question if you use tools for teaching/learning is to think about why and how you’d like the tools to be used. In my opinion reflection is a very good way to identify future learning goals and recent learning activitys. While a Blog could be used to collect parts of and Links to the Students Work and offers a way to structure and reflect these collections, it seemed to me that using it as a starting point for a ePortfolio would be a good chance.
4. Collecting, organizing and reflecting on stuff from the could be easily done with pencil and paper but there are some important things missing. It is not that easy to cope with Multimedia content an a piece of paper, but yes, you are right, doing a ePortfolio on a Computer offline is no problem, organizing important webressourzes is a little more difficult if your ePortfolio is offline. For me the most important aspect to do your Portfolio online is that you can collaberate, and communicate with others, share your ideas, get feedback, help and motivation from lets say all over the world seems to be impossible if you’re working offline.

I know that doing this ePortfolio with good content and reflection is a lot of work for the Students, but I am sure that it is worth it.

Give Feedback!

To get a little bit more Feedback from “all over the world” I ask you to visit the Blogs of my seminar participants and read what they think about eLearning, how they get along with that and send them your comments. May be there are some interesting Ideas for your personal learning!
Here are the Links:
Daniel
Elena (not much activity yet)
Guerro (not much activity yet)
Hauke
Juliane
Luise
Martina
Samuel
Sascha (not much activity yet)
Selma
Simon
Simone
Susanne

Coming up

The past few weeks the students collected a lot of definitions and quotes about eLearning and related topics in the wiki for this seminar and within the nxt two weeks we will have presentations of little learning objects which should help to get to know what different abbreviations are meaning e.g. PLE, VLE, LCMS, CBT, … or words like Microlearning and so on. All this will be related to formal, non-formal and informal learning and I am pretty sure you can find interesting Articles within the students Blogs.