Swift success through sister cities First Impressions Resources (fir), the Brisbane based award-winning training company, announced the launch of their new venture, Swift eLearning, at the 2014 QLD ACPET State Forum in Brisbane today. Councillor Angela Owen-Taylor, the Deputy to the Lord Mayor for International Relations and Multicultural Affairs, congratulated Swift eLearning on this joint venture and highlighted the relationship formed between a Brisbane-based training and education organisation and Swift, an Indian company specialising in eLearning Solutions. "We are very excited to be part of this Swift eLearning launch, an event which celebrates the collaboration between two respected organisations, one from Brisbane and the other from our Sister City - Hyderabad." After an extensive tender process for development of its elearning materials, fir established a relationship with Swift eLearning Services in Hyderabad. Not only were Swift affordable but they were keen to understand fir’s needs. Not focused on selling a product, they took the time to develop a solution. In fact, fir was so impressed with Swift’s service and solutions "we joined forces to create a collaborative business model here in Australia" said Mike Wallace, CEO of fir. AmjadAli Syed was recruited from Swift in India to work with fir here in Australia to establish the business model and provide the technical expertise required. Amjad also acts as the conduit between Australia and India to ensure a smooth service delivery. "Working in the Australian marketplace with corporates and educators is providing us with a greater insight into the needs and requirements of the end-user; an insight that we didn’t have from Hyderabad. Ultimately this will result in learning solutions that are a better fit." The result of this Sister-City collaboration is an e-Learning services company that combines the benefits of a local presence and understanding with the efficiencies and technical expertise of an Indian organisation. Media contact: For further information visit: www.swiftelearning.com.au or contact Mike Wallace on (07) 3236 3322. The post Launch of Swift ELearning! appeared first on Swift eLearning Pyt Ltd.

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  I did a keynote at the LINQ conference in Brussels last week, I focused in particular on the positive and negative aspects of digital technologies, i.e. that there are always two sides to a coin. I began by showing one of the Pearson videos on the future of education. The videos are great as they really give a glimpse of what learning might look like in the near future; personalised, contextual, interactive, and visual.   In general digital technologies are beneficial because they can: enhance, augment, supplement, replace, enrich, expand and empower. They can be negative in that they can: detract, lessen, confuse, overwhelm, infringe and be time consuming or addictive. I then looked at this theme from five perspectives: openness, mobile learning, social media, digital identity and distributed cognition.   In terms of openness digital technologies enable more open practices and in the last ten years or so we have seen the massive increase in the number of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). We have also seen an increase in free resources, tools and expertise being available via online webinars, blogs, open repositories and journals, and social media. Much has been written about the pros and cons of these; positive in terms of opening up access and enabling social inclusion, negative in terms of being primarily elitist and more about ‘learning income than learning outcomes’. The positive aspects of more open practices are that they enable better transparency, afford a greater reach, facilitate equity and social inclusion, challenge existing business models, and result in a disaggregation of formal educational offerings. In terms of negative aspects, adopting an open approach has the danger of ‘laying yourself bare’, gives rise to issues about surveillance and privacy issues, can result in a misuse or misinterpretation of data, raises issues about quality and accreditation, and can raise issues around ownership. I referenced a number of projects that I have been involved with about openness; the 7Cs of Learning Design framework, the VMPass project on accreditation of non-formal and informal learning, a report for IPTS, OpenCred, on recognition of non-formal and informal learning and a current project, MOOCS4ALL which is developing a MOOC to help people design MOOCs.   Smart phones and tablets are now practically ubiquitous, and we have practically near ubiquitous wifi connectivity. They are now much more affordance, robust, light and with a good battery life. There is a range of excellent Apps available to support communication, productivity, curation and learning. The positive aspects of these mobile devices are that they mean learning anywhere, anytime is now a reality, more and more websites are mobile ready, learning is possible across contexts and devices. The negative aspects are that being online all the time means that there is no ‘down time’; people are expected to be online 24/7. We are increasingly dependent on these devices and more and more of our data is stored in the cloud. Finally many learners and teachers lack the necessary digital literacy skills to make effective use of these devices for learning purposes.   The third perspective I focused on was social media. I argued that we have seen a shift from a passive web to a participatory, interactive and social web, which is distributed, networked, dynamic, participatory, complex and open. There are now many many tools to support communication and collaboration and we are now part of a global, distributed networked of peers. The positive aspects of social media are that they provide us with a rich variety of ways to communicate and collaborate, enable us to be part of a global community of peers, provide us with access to a vast amount of information, facilitate rapid dissemination of information, and benefits of adopting crowd sourcing approaches. The negative aspects are that there is a lack of privacy, we leave digital traces, which can be negative, there is a danger of misuse of data, being openly online can result in cyberbulling and trolling, and there are issues around privacy and security. Finally they can be time consuming and addictive. I then showed a clip from a film I saw recently, ‘unfriended’, which is a horror move about social media. The film is shot entirely via a computer interface, through Skype and chat.   The fourth perspective was on digital identity. I raised the issue of how each of use presents ourselves online and how we interact with others. I argued that there were five facets associated with digital identity: reputation, impact, influence, productivity, and openness. And also that there was a relationship between identity, interaction and presence. Focusing a little more on presence, I referenced Mark Childs definition in terms of mediated presence (being there, immersion), social presence (projection of oneself, and perception of others, copresence (being somewhere with others), and self presence (or embodiment). The positive aspects of digital identity are that it can act as an extensive of your ‘real self - which can either be the same or different, to enables us to have an extended reach, and offers us the opportunity to explore the medium. The negative aspects are that it can lay ourselves bare, can result in a misinterpretation of identity, can lead to cyber-stalking or identity theft. I recounted my own negative experience of online dating, which I have blogged about before. I am looking forward to talking more about this when I take part in some research Bonnie Stewart and George Veletsianos are doing.   Finally I talked about distributed cognition, referencing Solomon’s use of the term.  In terms of positive aspects I referenced Perkin’s concept of ‘Person Plus’, i.e. our cognition is distributed between our brain and our online digital environment. Today’s digital environment provides us with access to vast amounts of information, and there are more and more sophisticated tools for finding, curating, managing and filtering information. In terms of the negative aspects, many lack the necessary digital literacy skills to harness digital technologies and it is easy to get lost or confused. Technologies are constantly changing and hence there is a lack of permanency. Some would argue that we are becoming over dependent on technologies and there is a growing moving for a call to ‘slow learning’ equivalent to the ‘slow cooking’ movement. Some, such as Stephen Hawkins, warn that with the increasingly sophistication of Artificial Intelligence, there is a danger that machines will take over…    So clearly digital technologies have many advantages and disadvantages, perhaps most chilling though are the words of Paul Virilio in his book the information bomb. He argues that technologies cannot exist without accidents, and that they separate us from real time and space…. Therefore, when not if technologies fail, that is it! Our lives are so utterly dependent and perhaps controlled by technologies. We can’t stop the march of technologies, and whilst we should celebrate the ways in which they can enhance our lives, we should also be aware of the potential downsides.      

Swift ELearning Pty. Ltd. is an Australian e-Learning company announcing the release of e-Learning Templates portal http://etemplate.swiftelearning.com.au for all the e-Learning users across the globe. We offer custom templates using Rapid e-Learning tools like Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate and Lectora. The templates includes: Graphical User Interface Engaging Slides Charts and Graphs Text and Graphic Layouts We invite you to download couple of our templates as a try at no cost. http://etemplate.swiftelearning.com.au/tag/free Bulk list of etemplates are in queue, moving forward we will be learning specific needs of the users and will turn our portal as a search engine for all types of etemplates. Do share your suggestions and thoughts at info[a]swiftelearning.com.au The post Launch of e-Learning Templates appeared first on Swift eLearning Pyt Ltd.

1.     Image from http://womensissues.about.com/od/violenceagainstwomen/a/CyberstalkingFS.htm As many of you know I am pretty open on social media and on the whole the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. It’s great to get comments on blog posts, get people replying or retweeting my tweets, participating in debates on fb or remotely following a conference. But recently I have had some experiences that have made me rethink my open policy. In general on fb I accept friendship requests if we have mutual friends or I can see that they are in the same line of work. Recently I have had quite a lot of friendship requests from people I have no connection with, furthermore when I look at their fb page, there is nothing there… Needless to say I don’t accept their friendship request. Another recent incident was that someone I did accept a friendship request from started fb messaging me, for some reason I felt uneasy about this and didn’t respond. Then this morning he started liking literally hundreds of my posts, so naturally I de-friended him. What on earth did he think he was doing? Cyberstalking can be defined as "Cyberstalking is the use of the Internet or other electronic means to stalk or harass an individual, a group, or an organization." Bonnie Stewart and George Veletsianos are doing an interesting study at the moment about disclosure online, people who are being staked, or victims of identity crime. I think given the openness of the web and the potential dangers of adopting open practice this is a timely and important study. I look forward to seeing the results. 

Swift Elearning Pty. Ltd. thanks to all the elearning users for making http://etemplate.swiftelearning.com.au portal a success. The huge number of downloads and valuable feedbacks are the most compelling evidences of our success and the need for more eTemplates. As planned, we have added a bulk of new eTemplates to help you develop effective learning experience. The current release of templates are developed in Articulate Storyline and includes following types: Graphical User Interface Effective and relevant learning environments are developed based on the nature and complexity of the topic. Engaging Slides Learner interactions are designed to present content into meaningful chunks and provide cognitive engagement experience. Charts and Graphs Varied types of charts and graphs are designed using suitable colors, animations and font styles. The ultimate objective is to represent the data in a clear and simple form. Text and Graphic Layouts Creative and distinct types of presentation patterns are used to accommodate large amount of content effectively. Once again, we invite you to download a couple of eTemplates as a try at no cost. http://etemplate.swiftelearning.com.au/tag/free Please do share your suggestions and thoughts at info[a]swiftelearning.com.au. The post Ready to use e-Learning templates for Articulate Storyline users appeared first on Swift eLearning Pyt Ltd.

. . Digital CitizenShip: Social Media AND Privacy I wrote already about "Privacy" on my blog posts Privacy In The Digital World-SHOULDN’T We Talk About It!?, Smartphone pictures pose privacy risks … Source: gustmees.wordpress.com See on Scoop.it - FootprintDigital

I am current involved in an exciting EU project called TELL-OP being coordinated by Murcia University. The project focuses on the development of mobile Apps for second language acquisition. We are currently undertaking a survey and would be grateful if you could take the time to complete if this is of interest to you. Here are the details:  Dear Colleague, TELL-OP is a EU-funded Strategic Partnership that seeks to promote the take-up of innovative practices in European language learning by supporting personalized learning approaches that rely on the use of information and communication technologies and open education resources. Our aim is to promote cooperation in the field of language learning and we hope to foster the use of already available web 2.0 services to facilitate the personalized e-learning of languages in the contexts of higher and adult education, in particular, through the use of mobile devices. To learn more about us, you can visit our website at http://www.tellop.eu/. In the framework of our project, we intend to create a mobile application for foreign language learning that includes a selection of language processing technologies. We have designed a survey to help us learn more about the current use of these technologies and mobile devices in the European teaching context. Our survey seeks to explore the spread and take-up of language, and/or text, processing technologies for language learning. Completing the survey should not take more than 10 minutes. By answering the questions, you will be taking part in a European project that seeks to foster the use of new technologies in adult and Higher Education for the learning of languages. You will similarly have the possibility to be among the first teachers to test our TELL-OP app as soon as it becomes available  (during the first half of 2017). Please make sure you leave your e-mail so we can get back to you. Survey in English Survey in French Survey in German Survey in Spanish Survey in Turkish   Thank you for your time, support and feedback!   The TELL-OP team. www.tellop.eu  

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