The Techomnivore blog is back online and will now be a collection of ideas about, examples of, and strategies for eLearning.  This is because my life has been immersed in eLearning this past year and I’m ready to start sharing.  I took off a year from blogging which became time that served me well-ish.  I stopped writing because it stopped being fun — I became obsessed with readership numbers and started writing about anything that passed my way.  The quality of the entries suffered while the tone became labored and disinterested.  Of course, a job switch, a move into a different borough, and a lot of change contributed to an unconscious decision to put the blog on hold.  Unfortunately, a stagnant blog is an easy target for a virus and my blog database became infected beyond recovery. 

Lesson learned, it’s a new day; change is refreshing and sometimes a break is just what we need.  I’ve had the opportunity to concentrate on learning about online professional development, virtual environments, and digital curriculum resources.  Much of what I will share will be examples of eLearning, techniques and best practices around the development of eLearning modules, and reflection on this new venture that the education industry is embarking on:  online learning opportunities.

New topic is eLearning and I will be aiming to create a resource for educators looking to design interactive elearning modules that help them transition their teaching to a new digital delivery platform — for an audience whose taste in sophisticated multimedia outpaces theirs.

Northern Michigan University graduate program is offering an online course this semester on Teaching Science in a Virtual World. This course is designed for K-12 teachers and will take place during the second half of the semester in the Teen Grid.  It begins next week - in Second Life!

This course is part of the Masters of Science in Science Education program at NMU and is part of a growing trend to leverage virtual environments in K-12 education.  This is another example of how seriously higher education takes learning in the virtual world.  The notice continues:

“The course will begin with some basic skills.  At the same time we will be developing a project to be used with teens. Teachers who have the ability to bring students into SL will be encouraged to do so but it is not required.  During the second half we will be working on the NOAA islands in Teen SL with kids developing the project we created.”

Sounds great!  I love how educators are buying into the idea of using virtual realms — continues to bolster my growing opinion that the immersive learning platform is more effective than the antiquated message based system that has been struggling to gain a following (I’m talking about Moodle, Blackboard, etc…)  ”It’s the best we have” is the most common sentiment about the most popular platforms we have today and I agree.  But as our technology evolves to comfortably and reliably support virtual learning environments, I think many will prefer to learn in-world.