useful where the learner lives some distance from the learning facility and needs to access material/content remotely.
A relatively new, to me anyway, topic is Distributed Learning. This is where technology can really help to link teachers and classrooms over geographies together. I do mean to pluralise teachers and classrooms here for a reason because Distributed Learning could have a mixture of teachers and classrooms all linked together. An example would be a classroom in Manchester UK with students and teaching staff all linked to a classroom in Cape Town South Africa where there are also teaching staff and students all taking part in the same learning session. This could be extended to include multiple classrooms linking the best teaching resources on a global basis in realtime with full interactivity, video, voice and what ever else maybe needed.
This is a link to a real life example where a Masters level lecture was delivered over 4 campus sites.
This concept can also be extended to the research community. Much research is already performed on a distributed basis so nothing new there.
To make this happen we can exploit the following:
With this, Microsoft Research has been developing a research platform called ConferenceXP. The ConferenceXP research platform enables researchers and developers to create distributed applications that take advantage of ConferenceXP technology as well as Tablet PCs and wireless networks. It also enables them to develop the collaborative tools and applications they need without having to build them from the ground up. By partnering with research organizations and universities, the ConferenceXP project combines the academic community’s expertise in the learning sciences with Microsoft’s expertise in technology.