I’m in Melbourne this week for ASCILITE, hosted by Deakin Uni. In addition to getting out and about on a very pleasant Sunday in the city, I attended a pre-conference workshop by Grainne Conole of the Open University UK on learning design. Grainne has been very active in e-learning research and publication in recent years, including lots of work synthesising and extending what we know about learning design. By her own description there are no ‘answers’ in terms of definitive frameworks or recipes for e-learning, but lots of intriguing possibilties.
One of the interested things highlighted in the session today is a social networking site/tool for designers to share ideas and creation connections between themselves and other ideas, artefacts and people who are in a position to benefit users and their abilities to design…see Cloudworks…although it is still early days, there has been a flurry of activity with Grainne’s session and you can get some idea of the potential of this site to grow and develop into a valuable resource.
Another thing Grainne mentioned is a collaborative project with Martin Dougiamous (of Moodle fame) on the moodle.org site…the project is aiming to develop a Moodle course on ‘how to create an brilliant online course’…if you’re a Moodle user and regular visitor to Moodle.org, you may want to check out the progress of that project in the weeks and months to come.
Posted by ben.kehrwald 
Mousework 