At team of us at work are designing a face-to-face workshop on designing online activities. Although the process has been quite lengthy as inevitably collaborative processes are, it is useful to get thoughts and illustrations from a group of individuals who have approached it from different angles.
We are all eLearning developers and have worked in the field for quite a few years, I came straight into eLearning as a manager and have predominantly managed technology implementation projects and course re-designs that integrate technology in learning and teaching e.g. new VLE and a Learning Repository. I finished a Masters in Education in eLearning (online part time) at Hull Uni last year, which gave me a good grounding in learning and teaching strategies and organisational issues. The online design and authoring I have been involved in has been using wysiwyg editors in blogs, google sites, wikis etc., in the cloud; Dreamweaver, Wimba, screencapturing software e.g. captivate and the whole range of tools in VLEs. The colleagues I manage have a broad range of multimedia online creation skills, as well as learning and teaching knowledge which compliments the team. Anyway to cut a very long technical story short when we undertake activities like this we always have the chicken and egg conversation is it technology then create activity, create activity then technology, I alway opt for the latter possibly because of the way I have been immersed in eLearning it seems to make more natural sense to think about the teaching first then see how the technology can enhance - but not for everyone. I am aware for others the technology is more interwoven with respect to what they can do in the learning and teaching e.g. we have a VLE what can I do with it and even though institutions emphasis is on learning and teaching when large proprietary systems are purchased it is possible that the sometimes the shift sometimes moves to how can these e-tools be integrated in teaching, so the innovation influences the practice.
So the question is - is there room for both approaches. When I am running a workshop I start from the learning and teaching perspective as this engages with culture of the group, however, sometimes we need to get the innovators testing the tools so that we can have the illustrations for the practice.
