Wednesday, 19 September 2007

Learning in an Instant

The thing I love about the internet is how quickly I can learn about virtually anything. Elearning doesn't have to be a full on college course. It doesn't have to take weeks to occur. It doesn't have to be towards a certificate or degree. I wonder about something, anything and moments later....I read, listen, observe and know.

Here's a quick example of my random elearning for today...

I get rss feeds from a variety of sources and one of the first I looked at today was about sand dunes and why they sing or making booming noises (Discovery). Cool seems interesting. Two minutes later I've read it quick article about them, the new theory behind the sounds and now I'm hooked with new questions. What does it sound like? What does it look like? Is it like an avalanche? Two minutes later I'm now watching videos and listening to audio clips. If I wanted there were lots of more links to explore the topic about. All from one sentence sent to me through my rss reader.

In 4 minutes I've learned about singing sand dunes. Asolutely amazing.

4 comments:

Stephen Downes said...

Just think. Only 10 years ago you would have had to go to grad school to learn about singing sand dunes.

Tracy Parish said...

Maybe it is too bad that I can't get a degree in "Interesting But Useless Facts 101", but I could be an asset on a trivia team.

Denece said...

Tracy can i use this post as an example of elearning not needing to be formal but relevant and interesting to the learner? I'm leading some web 2.0 learning for newbies.

Tracy Parish said...

Change Agent: Yes please go right ahead and use this. I'm delighted you are asking.