Kirsten’s E-Learning Blog

So I’ve seen the terms, and I’ve even talked about them, and I can even define them – LMS is a learner management system, and LCMS is a learning content management system. Do I know what they are exactly? Heck no!

That’s where Greenberg’s article comes in.

According to Greenberg:

The focus of an LMS is to manage learners, keeping track of their progress and performance across all types of training activities. It performs heavy-duty administrative tasks, such as reporting to HR and other ERP systems but isn’t generally used to create course content.

however,

the focus of an LCMS is on learning content. It gives authors, instructional designers, and subject matter experts the means to create e-learning content more efficiently.

The table below shows the capabilities and differences between LMS and LCMS.

These definitions and the table above have greatly assisted in my understanding of what LMS’s and LCMS’s are, and I think it will aid me in my technology choices for my DoCS assignment.

Our class on Second Life was a little while ago, however since then I have signed up and gone through Orientation Island and a few other places like jokaydia and Australia myself.

Even on my broadband, SL is slow and clunky. It takes a bit of time for my avatar to realise I’m trying to move it, and by that stage I’ve already clicked the forward button 4 times so I end up moving past my destination But that might not be the broadband necessarily, it could be my graphics card also – I know it’s only basic…

That aside, I can see the benefits of SL for learning in organisations that have the capacity and ability to handle the bandwidth needed to support the program.

Gronstedt’s article “Second Life Produces Real Training Results” puts the spotlight on a number of companies who already make use of SL in their training including IBM, who is

investing millions of dollars in the 3-D Internet virtual world and other spaces, including some 25 “islands” in Second Life.

Learning can be facilitated by SL in a number of ways. For example

Flying your avatar inside a molecule at the science library in Second Life, for instance, gives you a novel view of the placement of carbon atoms in three-dimensional space. Another Second Life museum, Exploratorium, has built a scale model of the earthmoon system. Even astronomers have found that walking their avatars from Earth to the moon gives them a more immediate understanding of the sizes and distances involved.

Gronstedt also mentions the University of California’s psychology class, the schizophrenia hallucination house. Watching the house being walked through when I wasn’t controlling the avatar was scary enough, let alone being the one sitting at home by herself walking through! It really dealt with the effects of schizophrenia well, something, as Gronstedt states, can’t be matched by sitting in a lecture or reading a text. As someone who used to live next door to a schizophrenic, this virtual demonstration of what they hear and see really makes me understand why they did the things they did.

This topic comes at an appropriate time, as I have been getting quite distracted from writing these blogs by Facebook, and I was also signed into MySpace earlier today.

Lee Lefever’s Common Craft Show has yet another simple and informative video – “Social Networking in Plain English” This video gives an overview of the social networking concept, which is useful for people who have never seen it or don’t understand it.

I have had experience with multiple social networking websites. The first was MySpace, which I joined because my friends kept telling me to. It was interesting to find quite a number of former classmates and work colleagues, and I have reignited some friendships with people that I feel will continue over my life.

Next was LiveJournal. I used this mainly as a blog. There’s a lot of ranty blogs there around the time of the 2006 World Cup, mainly me whining about how terrible the referees were, and how much the other teams cheated. I only joined this one because my friend practically joined me up for me. She stood there and watched me join up,telling me what to do.

Then there was Bebo. It has a similar idea to MySpace, being more about your profile and what you write on it than blogging. You can also edit your backgrounds to make it something personal. Mine for example is of a beach scene. I don’t use it very much, mainly because I don’t have many friends on it. I think its mainly targeted at the younger age group who can’t join MySpace because of the age limiting (although there are ways around it).

And finally, most recently I joined Facebook. This site is becoming progressively more addictive for me. I have found so many people from school that I have lost touch with over time, and have found so many interlinkages between my different groups of friends.

For example, Jess Piper and I used to see each other at netball all the time. We didn’t know each other’s names, but we knew each other’s faces. We then turn up at uni on our first day and discover we’re doing the same uni course. After I joined Facebook and added some of my work friends, I discovered that Jess is friends with some of them as well, including Emma, who now works with Kate Sanders! Such as small world we live in…

University of Maryland University College defines asynchronous communication as “communication taking place at different times or over a certain period of time. The has acquired wide currency in online learning, where exchanges between teachers and students are frequently enacted asynchronously rather than in simultaneous or face-to-face conversations.”

Asynchronous communication could include email, wikis, chat rooms and many social networking sites.

Asynchronous communication is useful when ideas need to develop over time, with people being given time to reflect on and research their ideas .