The Virtual Learning Network

At present the VLN is located in Interact and consists of a number of areas like:
Enrollments, Timetables, Scheduling, Communities of Practice, Professional development etc. Some of these areas need addressing, It needs to migrate out of this environment to another and the thinking at the moment is Moodle.

The image shows some of the areas already covered by the VLN but also some future thinking.
What needs to be done?

1. Develop Business case and action plan. Outputs would be
1. Business case 1 week 40 hours
2. Technical specs 40 + 60 hours
3. Action plan 20 hours total 160
   
2. Migration and build 12 months
   
3. Develop and implement community ownership model three options around being
1. Community owned funded partially by MoE
2. Stay where it is at MoE and worked for and by the community
3. Completely owned by the community with funding options from the community as well as possible contributions and support from time to time from the MoE

I will have another think and add another post

Day Three of conference

Had a workshop with professor Stepehn Heppell and then his keynote.
Was a frank and open discussion on some of the work he is doing like notschool etc.
Talked a wee bit about the future of the VLN
Headed of to Jasper after the last key note.
What an awesome journey

And then onto Edmonton to meet up with Cathy King. Will fill in details of visit with Cathy later.
I have had a chance to talk about and think about the future of the VLN with CAM on this trip which has been very useful

Where to from here?

Out of the conference there are a few things I will follow up on:

1. Develop the relationship with Darren and Keewaytinook Internet High School Balmertown, Ontario,
2. Develop the relationship with Linda Wright and Michelle Eady from Northern Onterio Sioux-Hudson Literacy Council
3. Develop a relationship with Randy LaBonte and Tim Winklmans Ministry of Education in British Colombia Distance Learning

Now the conference is over I have had time to talk and reflect with and do some in depth talking to a range of people re the VLN I now want to start to develop the VLN into a world class brokerage site.

Day 2

Traveled from Jasper to Edmonton today to meet with Cathy King VC RLN Provincial Coordinator for Alberta.
Looking forward to this meeting will let you know how it goes.
What an awesome trip through the Canadian Rockies wow breathtaking.
Day 2 of the conference was as good as the first day in Bannf.
One quote I liked was
"If technology doesn't work for people it doesn't work" Simple but true.
I went to two sessions on 2nd life and how it is being used with tertiary organisations as well as the journey they went through.
In summary it was the fact they tried to recreate the physical world of their organisation into the virtual world and it didn't work.
I guess the lesson here is create a dynamic environment that grows around sustainability.
As I have mentioned before I am redeveloping the VLN (Virtual Learning Network) sitee intial stages and has moved beyond this to other technologies.
I will go into this in another post with my ideas.
The other valuable part of this conference was meeting and talking to Prof Stephen Heppell what a cool guy.
I meet an talked to Randy LaBonte and Tim Winklmans from the
So far it had focus on Video Conferencing in the Ministry of Education in British Colombia, A valuable conversation as they are going through some of the same issues we are. They are offering courses that have no start or finish time. Excellent. You can find an outline and a lot of policy docs etc on their site Distance Learning
The other guy I meet up with were Darren Potter the Principal from Keewaytinook Internet High School Balmertown, Ontario, Excellent exchange of ideas and thoughts. Darren works with 1st Nation children in Balmertown, Ontario

The other guy I met was from Niagara Falls he is involved with ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) I will talk about him later.
Where to from here will be in my next posting.

1st Day at Conference

I am working backwards but there ya go who cares. The first day of the conference was cool.
I went to 3 sessions
Session one was the best of the day for me as I listened to Linda Wright and Michelle Eady from Northern Onterio talk about their project teaching with 1st Nation children with the use of synchronous and asynchronous technologies, fascinating stuff. I was approached afterwards to talk about possibilities ōf connecting with NZ kids. I really look forward to hearing from Michelle about this. You can find out more about their excellent project at:
Sioux-Hudson Literacy Council

The second session was about C.I.D.E.R the Canadian Institute of Distance Education Research while interesting it was not really my cup of tea. I will mention it to a friend of mine at work Helen who may be able to use the links to C.I.D.E.R coordinated at Athabasca University

The third session was with Adobe Connect sales team. We have been having some issues since the upgrade to adobe 6 so i wanted to see and here about adobe 7 but this has not been released yet. An alright session.

The fourth was Cam and I presenting on the VLN . The Virtual Learning Network is one of my foci's of work and has been for the last 5 years. We had about 40 people attended and a number of excellent comments were made . Very nice. A few areas of interest came out of this and I will detail these later.
We drove from Bannf to Jasper today through the Canadian Rockies what a very awesome trip.
Ī forgot to bring the cable to download the pics will post some later.
Well goodnight tired now

CNIE conference in Banff, Alberta Canada

At a session with Professor Stephen Heppell on the last day talking about Communities.
The first community was in the early 90's and was children centred part of the things to look at email returns and identify what age group wrote what emails and of course they got it all wrong.

notschool started with the first 100 worst kids in Britain and is still running at a 98% engagement rate (Excellent) . This is an excellent project that is still going on.
It is all asynchronous for good reasons. Go read about why?
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/socialinclusion/youngpeople/notschoolpractice.html Ultraversity http://cohort4.ultraversity.net/ Another interesting project please go and have a look, Degrees were built around the users and most never meet. Studied and worked full time for 3 years. Go read about this as well.

Talking heads was the 3rd project a community of head teachers online 21,000
http://www.ncsl.org.uk/aboutus/pressreleases/pr-121107.cfm

Communities of practice have to run on strict rules eg if set up for notschool, head teachers etc it has to be strictly by for them by them don’t let outsiders come in.
Content is not King
http://rubble.heppell.net/talking_heads/aboutth/index.htm
Excellent session thanks Stephen

Conference

I am at the CNIE conference in Banff, Alberta Canada.
First International Conference of the new Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE)

http://www.athabascau.ca/CNIE-RCIE/english/


It is the second day and a friend of mine professor Stephen Heppell has encouraged me to start a blog so here I am his blog is at http://www.heppell.net/weblog/stephen/

It has been interesting so far. I think will do a new posting for each bit I want to talk about.

I am in the process of re inventing the Virtual Learning Network that I manage for MoE (Ministry of Education in New Zealand it is hosted at http://virtuallearning.school.nz/
My next posting will start with day one of the conference and then day two and then I will launch into my work at the MoE and then into the redevelopment of the vln