e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates
Cloud Computing: The Habitat of the e-Learning Ecosystem
According with the Oxford Dictionary, an ecosystem is “all the plants, animals, and people living in an area considered together with their environment as a system of relationships”. In the lecture “Conceptualizing e-Learning“, Copes and Kalantzis said that a learning environment is in some sense like an ecosystem, consisting of the complex interaction of human, textual, discursive and spatial dynamics. This metaphor help us to understand the multiple factors that affect the learning process or, in a wide vision, the education.
But if we talk about ecosystem, we must talk about habitat. Quoting the Oxford Dictionary again, a habitat is “the natural surroundings in which an animal or plant usually lives”. And the habitat of e-learning ecosystem is cloud computing, or as Ravindra Dastikop says “cloud is new learning habitat”. Cloud computing is totally aligned with e-learning affordances, especially with ubiquitous learning for two principal reasons: access from anywhere without special software, hard disk space, installation, or maintenance; and multi-tenancy, one server, one application, and many users.
Dropbox, Google Drive, or Facebook are some cloud computing features. In my experience in higher education, Dropbox offers many functions who make easy the teaching and facilitate the new learning:
- Available teaching resources. Teacher shares their files with students and they can consult anytime during the course.
- E-portfolio construction with traced learning process. Student shares their files with teacher, who can coment and assess continuously. This feedback is registered in the files.
- Collaborative work is easy to do and to highlight. One file can be modified by many persons, and all changes are saved with the user register.
- The tasks are sent when the students save their files. There are not lost homeworks, software failures, or anything to justify the no task accomplishment.
In virtual schools, online courses, or traditional classes, cloud computing is a tool who helps teachers to reach their goals, in the way that they have decided to achieve them.
The completed explication of cloud computing made by Ravindra Dastikop is affordable in http://www.slideshare.net/indravi/cloud-computing-what-is-there-for-me or in http://dastikop.blogspot.com
A tutorial video about Google Drive is at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeFJvXhFJd8
or about Dropbox at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hKLonMQSYs
You can see the adventages of Facebook for teachers at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnJuWnU5IiY
Thank you Susana for the videos. You clearly mentioned all the aspects of cloud computing aligned with the affordance of ubiquitous learning, which is not only that the learner has the ability to have access to recourses anywhere, anytime, but he can also interact with the instructor and the peers resulting in an active engagement in the process of learning. And this interaction can happen simultaneously to many other activities without interruptions. Cloud computing is not only a useful tool for students and teachers regarding the achievement of the educational goals (21 century skills) but also gives the teacher a different role in the learning environment, from that of the sage on the stage to that of the guide on the side, as Esther Wojcicki said in one of her lectures at a symposium at Standord Univeristy