Reading ‘Using the VLE more’ via @jamesclay #VLE

As with quite a few of the posts from James Clay this one is short and sweet – ‘Using the VLE more‘ – and struck a chord with me.

We all know that time is money and everyone is busy; whether it’s teaching, research, marking, meetings, etc. At some point in our busy schedules we need to explore the tools currently available to us, even if we’re going to go outside and try and find something new and shiny to play with (we should at least have tried the existing tools before discounting them). Getting academics and administrative staff to take time out of their busy day for repeated workshops on features and functions of the VLE just won’t work.

But how about this; if they can attend just one and this one workshop will introduce all the features through their own learning and that of their colleagues. Would that work? I thinks so – we ask the students to help each other, so why not do the same for us?

What caught my attention in James’ post was his closing sentence:

“This is about moving the responsibility of using the VLE to the practitioner, and their continuing personal development in the use of the VLE.”

This will enable a (fairly) structured training schedule where the full features of the VLE can be explored by everyone because of the feedback method; the teams report back to each other (informal coffee morning?) on feature they tried and how they got on. By learning from each other they get exposure to tools and features they may not have thought of (or liked) before.

Thanks James.

PS. A comment left on James’ post was from ‘Leia’ and linked to the following “How to be an expert” chart expands (slightly tongue-in-cheek) on the notion that you need to try something a few times before you know if it works, but you’ll often give up before you become familiar with it enough for it to mean something (positive or negative):