Our First Online Meeting - Benefits of e-Learning

Our first online meeting took place on Thursday, 2 August. While there were a few hiccups with getting audio to work, we did manage to get sound from everyone except Ferdinand. Fortunately Ferdinand could hear us and use chat so wasn't excluded from the meeting. It did reinforce the need to test equipment before the actual meeting and logging on in plenty of time.

Our first hour was spent on the creation of blogs and wikis, and what benefits these have for both knowledge sharing within and across organisations, and for VET clients. To find out more about why you would use a blog, wiki or some of the other social software tools for teaching and learning, check out Pages 31-34 of the Networks, Connections and Community: Learning with Social Software report. There are also some excellent examples of social software being used in teaching and learning and for knowledge sharing and staff learning and development on the Report's research wiki. Other exemplars are available on the NSW LearnScope wiki.

We did spend a little time on creating a Personal Learning Environment (PLE)- to find out more check out Carole McCulloch's PLE wiki. Carole also shares a step by step slideshare guide on how to set up iGoogle. And discussed again why we should tap into the EdNA Network's Community Forum. Instructions on how to dictate how you receive EdNA Group messages are on our wiki.

It was interesting to see the shift in energy when we actually moved away from tools and focussed on the overall topic of The Benefits of e-Learning for our Clients. The atmosphere started to buzz. Unfortunately time was our enemy once again as we could have spent longer. Some of the benefits are noted below.



Some discussion took place on just how accessible teachers are and the need for boundaries etc. We might carry that discussion across to our wiki.