With educational networking, you have access to a 24×7 online experience not unlike the connecting and sharing that happens face-to-face at conferences. But now, geography is no longer a constraint, critical mass of interest needed is lower, and time and cost to participate are significantly more affordable.

Here’s a great new white paper, “Educational Networking: The Important Role Web 2.0 Will Play in Education.” It was developed by our own Social Learning Consultant Steve Hargadon, who is also the founder of Classroom 2.0. The paper discusses social networking, Web 2.0, the emergence of educational networking, and its adoption for personal learning.

It also looks at how our LearnCentral social learning network for educators is taking educational networking a big step forward.We invite you to become part of the educational networking revolution. It’s free to join, and you get a free personal meeting room and access to a free public conference room for larger events.

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

They also hosted a webinar about the report findings. Click here to access the webinar recording.

You can also download the report abstract, which includes a listing of the Guild’s Member’s Choice Award winners.

We’re quite proud that Elluminate Live! won both a Platinum Award in the category of Satisfaction – Education and Government Synchronous Learning Systems and a Gold Award in the Market Share – Education and Government Synchronous Learning Systems category. For more information, read our press release.

In addition, Cammy Bean published a summary of the webinar in her Learning Visions blog.

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

As a result, I am working on a new white paper for Elluminate about just that. The idea is that to continue to get funding for online programs, you need to provide facts/figures relating to the success of this technology.

If you are tracking results data, like course enrollments, student participation, retention rates, test scores, completion rates, or student/teacher satisfaction, I would love to hear from you.

 In addition, we would like to use the white paper to suggest tools for collecting this data for those academic institutions who would like to do so. So please share how you are collecting this data as well.

 Please reply through the blog or contact me at blogteam [at] elluminate (dot) com.

And if you are interested in reading our first white paper in the series, “The Impact of Synchronous Online Learning in Academic Institutions: Customer Experiences from K12 and Higher Education,” click here.

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

Flickr started out as a place to post photos, yet has created a new approach to social  interation that happens to use digital photos.  Google maps started out as a way help you get somewhere, yet its SDK and Google Earth and “My Maps” have hastened the spread of tools to analyze and visually present personal and organizational information using maps.  Computer-based digital audio started out as a way to deliver music and has expanded into personal, educational, and political podcasting with “long tail” characteristics.

Are conferences at hotels ready to morph into something else as well?  Why, yes, they are. (They won’t be replaced 100% by something else, they will be morphed and enhanced into something else.)

Why must a conference be expensive and centralized?  Why shouldn’t large percentages of people attend (or present) remotely?  Why shouldn’t the entire conference be online?  Why shouldn’t the interactions continue in a formalized way AFTER the “conference” ends? With interactive real-time conferencing, recordings, moodles, wikis, flickr, del.icio.us, and boatloads of other tools, isn’t it time to include and interact with those who can’t afford to travel?  And, perhaps more important than reducing travel costs, can’t we leverage these tools to create ongoing discussions, creation of work-product, and deep relationships amongst people around the world who would otherwise not interact anywhere close to “personally”?

I think the Connectivism conference, the Illinois Online conference, Moodlemoot, the Keystone conference, the Future of Education conference, and the Horizon Project, amongst many others, are beginning to document and illustrate the critical success factors of conferences that are not “conferences” but the same time confer even more “conference-ness” than a “real” conference.

Best to all, Happy Mother’s day, and keep on onlinin’

Gary

From my perspective, the answer is YES! Using Elluminate Live! as an example, there’s a learning curve to understand the functionality of the web collaboration environment. Then, as our clients tell us, the technology becomes transparent, allowing moderators and participants to focus on teaching and learning. So in this case, invisibility follows familiarity.

 Then there’s the question of universal design, as my colleague Gary poses in his blog entry of 4/2/07. Of course, the ultimate goal should be to build in accessibility from the beginning. Easy to say, harder to do. Take a look about what Elluminate has to say about accessibility.

 And as for Lynn’s car example, I have a different view. Much to the dismay of my husband, my interest in automotive technology stops at turning the key!

 - Beth for Elluminate

Gary here, after three long weeks on the road. (Yes, that is ironic from a webconferencing company – but managing ongoing relationships takes occasional F2F and the frequency of rich interactions that webconferencing allows.)

So, anyhow, the three conferences I attended were very interesting.  I have boiled down one big question from each of these conferences.  Clearly, there were many more questions answered and raised – but hey, this is a BLOG and not a book.  (Not yet anyway.)

Here they are…

From the Alliance for Distance Education in California conference – my big question:

• In universal design, a vendor can address it at the start of a product’s design, or try to (less effectively) “add it on” after a product is designed or even after its first release. How do we bring the idealistic view of “build it from inception” closer to the practical reality of “bolt it on after” in order to bring universal accessibility to products?

From the Apple Digital Campus Leadership Institute and the Georgia Digital Innovations group at Georgia College and State University - my big question (after I watched a student presentation on their trip overseas):

• Who has it “better” – an international exchange student circa 2007 who can blog, videochat, IM, Flickr, podcast, e-mail, and have free VoIP talks with their friends and parents back home essentially instantly, or an exchange student from an earlier generation (say, oh, Fall 1985 at Kansai Gaidai?) that had the two-week or greater latency of a handwritten letter to communicate back home with friends and family?

From CoSN 2007 – my big question:

• Is the interactive whiteboard a boondoggle, or does it create a new way to learn (especially when combined with real-time webconferencing)?

As you may imagine, I have my opinions on these questions.  However, what are yours?  Please comment!

Warm regards, and keep onlinin’,

Gary Dietz