I read the following article in order to perpare myself for a topic at my oral exam tomorow. I'll be talking how current e-learning technologies can or cannot support cooperative learning. The mentioned article here shows a few really interesting links from e-learning and Web 2.0 technology. The author catches up on the change from content to manageable micro-content, and then shows how thos micro content managing tools are an enrichement to e-learning settings. Very interesting!

ALEXANDER, B. (2006): Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): S. 32–44. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0621.pdf

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in on subject at 21:16 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

So I finally got to decide which test to use for my statistical analysis. Unluckily the lecture I took about statistics was in 1999… So I got to research on certain issues now again. But the web is quite a good place to get answers for certain questions, so I see that Pearson vs. Spearman is a quite common issue, So it didn’t take me long to finde some sources to solve my problem:

„The Pearson and Spearman's coefficients are mathematically identical, EXCEPT that the Spearman rank coefficient is calculated from the ranks of each variable, not the actual values. Once the values are ranked, they both use the same formula.” Source.

„Bei intervallskalierten und normalverteilten Proben wird die Produkt-Moment-Korrelation nach Pearson, bei ordinalskalierten und nicht normalverteilten Proben die Rangkorrelation nach Spearman verwendet, welche die Ränge der untersuchten Daten miteinander vergleicht (Bühl & Zöfel 1995, Sachs 1993). Letzteres Verfahren gilt zudem als robuster gegenüber Ausreißern (Sachs 1993). Precht und Kraft (1992) sowie Bühl und Zöfel (1995) weisen darauf hin, dass eine Korrelationsanalyse nur dann sinnvoll ist, wenn der Zusammenhang linear ist; für U-förmige Zusammenhänge tendiert r gegen 0.“ Source.

So it should be better to use Spearman for me, because a) I don’t have to justify why my data should be normally distributed and b) some of the values are not really metrically scaled.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in on subject at 15:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Four days to finish this ****-paper.. argl.. But it reminds me to some interesting songs:

Diebels – Ein schöner Tag (19??)
Vengaboys - 48 hours (2000)
Die Ärzte – 3-Tage-Bart (1996)
Counting Crows – Four days (1999)
Patrick Nou – Five days (2003)
Intermission ft. Lori Glori – Six days (1993)
Sportfreunde Stiller - 7 Tage – 7 Nächte (2002)
The Beatles – Eight days a week (1964)

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life, Media at 01:22 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Seems like the efforts I’m putting into my business teaching exam are finally successful. My concept for this exam is almost done. Although there are some spots to improve on, I’m quite confident that my preparation will at least be sufficient to pass.

The topic I specialised in is “media diversity at the vocational education – chances and risks” under this very broad topic I took out one perspective of media diversity. This covers all kind of internet / e-learning technologies, which might be interesting for education. But since it is also a really big topic to discuss how these technologies can or cannot improve education I will further put my focus on efficient usage of those technologies in classes. For this usage a necessity for hybrid/complex teaching and learning environment can be seen. How coincidental the concept of “Selforganized Learning” fits here!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in on subject at 14:10 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Guess I’ll need that for my exam on Wednesday - at least as a snippet. So I use this topic to break the series of “useless” tagged entries… First there are two perspectives on this topic on is more macro-economical and quantitative, and considers the different available media offerings in a country e.g. the topic that German Publishing giant Springer (who among other things publishes “Bild” – Germany’s most read tabloid) was not allowed to take over the private TV broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1. So if there would only be one or two big companies running all the media in a country you could consider the media diversity as very shallow.

The other approach towards media diversity is more micro-economical and qualitative. This is more the perspective I want to use when I’m writing about media diversity related to teaching. Here you can consider it as the “use of different tools, media types and materials”. So in this context we might just consider it as many different media channels, which are used. Talking about inevitably the various possibilities of the internet may strike us. It can’t be regarded as one media channel, but has to be analyzed more deeply to get an overview over the different channels there.

Further thoughts on this topic are appreciated!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media, on subject at 13:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Working with the internet there are always great temptations just to spend a little time off track und to do something which is not targeting your main goal. So I have advices, which were quite helpful for me so far:

• Set Miranda/ICQ into DND-Mode and hide the Window – You will be stiell there, but you won’t get disturbed by blinking messages our sounds when certain persons change there online status
• Log off at Google’s individual page - It is a real nice feature to have the most interesting feeds on the screen while searching for something. But it will also very much distract your attention from the really important problems.
• Use a view moments to get a Winamp Playlist which will not tempt you to manually change the title every view minutes. Get some easy listening music into it. Don’t try to use the easy listening of some radio station… Even hourly news might kick you off track.
• Blank out the windows taskbar – There are always things that can distract you from there. Even if its an open defrag program (you wouldn’t believe how much time you can spend viewing your computer moving files)
• Outlook hast to be switched off. Even if you don’t automatically poll your mails every 10 minutes but in less frequent intervals. Just don’t do it. Deleting Junk-Mail also takes precious time..

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Things to know at 13:11 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

This is the task I got to full fill for the next 2 weeks. I will try not to look to much left and right and focus on the work to be done. So I won’t visit pages with news that much often, I will check my feed-reader not more than 2 times a day, and will stay out of the Feki.de chat… And will try not to have too much “stupid ideas”.. But more on that issue later..

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 18:17 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)